The grip of this fiction on the American collective mind reflects a conjuncture of causes: the West’s guilt about the Holocaust; the proto-Zionist theology of American evangelical sects; U.S. imperial interests in Middle East oil reserves; and the West’s long-distrust of and contempt for Arabs and Muslims.

Propaganda produced by Israel and the American Jewish establishment inverts reality. This is crude stuff, manifestly false to anyone who would look up information published by a multitude of respected media and human rights organizations. But omissions and outright lies are probably a deliberate tactic: deny, deny … confuse, confuse … Like Israel’s building of “facts on the ground” (settlements, roads, etc.), it gains time; the hope is that Israeli power will eventually be so entrenched in the land of “Greater Israel” that nobody will remember Palestinians ever lived there.

The justice of the Palestinian cause is increasingly recognized in the West, particularly at the grassroots level. This is due, above all, to the courage and persistence of the Palestinians themselves. But scholars—Arab, Jewish, and other—who challenge the deceptive narratives also deserve credit. One such scholar is Gilbert Achcar, a Lebanese-born professor at the University of London and author of several books on the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy.

A smear campaign

The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives (Henry Holt and Company, 2010), Achcar’s most recent book, is an ambitious attempt to present an accurate history of Arab attitudes toward Nazism, Jews, and the Holocaust. It refutes the story told by pro-Israel zealots, who attribute hostility to Israel in the Arab world not to Israel’s actions, but to Arabs’ hatred of Jews: hatred, they argue, which originated in Islam and flourished with the Arabs’ collaboration with the Nazis during WWII.

The book has been well received by Middle East and Jewish Studies scholars, and Achcar has been invited to give talks on many university campuses. This raised the ire of David Horowitz, founder of the Horowitz Freedom Center, which, according to its mission statement, “combats the efforts of the radical left and its Islamist allies to destroy American values and disarm this country … The leftist offensive is most obvious on our nation’s campuses, where the Freedom Center protects students from indoctrination and political harassment.”

Last November, an article in the web FrontPage Magazine, edited and published by Horowitz, launched a smear campaign against Achcar. Focusing on a presentation by Achcar under the auspices of Middle East Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, the article appeared on a host of kindred websites, such as that of Campus Watch, an organization founded by Daniel Pipes, a main purveyor with Horowitz of Islamophobic material and whitewashing of Israel.¹

Another attack, directed at Achcar’s lecture in the Jewish Studies Department of the University of California at Davis, came from BlueTruth, a blog devoted to “refuting the accusations and exposing the lies that are being told … about Israel, Jews and pro-Israel organizations …” One such lie, to judge by the article, is that Israel was “built on Arab land.”

As someone whose mother and father were murdered in Auschwitz, and who herself survived the Nazis’ barbarous nationalism thanks to the courage of a group of Catholics, Protestants, Communists, and Jews, I find the idea that defending the “Jewish state” supersedes all other human obligations both immoral and senseless. Nothing, not even the Holocaust, justifies Israel’s treatment of Palestinians or the continuing efforts of pro-Israel zealots to show Arabs and Muslims as less than human. Israel and its unconditional supporters are on a path leading to catastrophe not only for Palestinians, but in the not very long run, for Israel itself.

The Arabs and the Holocaust

In his talk at Berkeley, Achcar described the book’s main purpose as deconstructing the image, dominant in the West and Israel, of Arabs as pro-Nazi. Relying on an extensive array of primary sources and historical studies, Achcar presents an “Arab world” with a great diversity of beliefs and opinions, a multiplicity of evolving ideological currents—just as in the West. The many Arab countries are not peopled by an indistinct mass of millions animated by ancestral hatred of the Jews. “The Arabs,” Achcar writes, do not exist “as a politically and intellectually uniform group.”²

The first part of Achcar’s book covers the period from 1933, when Hitler acceded to power, until Israel’s foundation in 1948. At that time, “liberal Westernizers” and Marxists took a strong stand against both Nazism and anti-Semitism. In the various Arab nationalist movements, sympathy for the Axis varied but was overall low, and opposition to Zionism did not translate into hatred of “the Jews.” It is only among “reactionary and/or fundamentalist pan-Islamists” that significant anti-Semitism and support for Nazism were found.

Several recent studies confirm this. For example, Achcar’s book quotes Israel Gershoni, a professor of Middle Eastern History at Tel Aviv University, who wrote that in the 1930s:

the overwhelming majority of Egyptian voices—in the political arena, in intellectual circles, among the professional, educated, urban middle classes and even in the literate popular cultures—rejected fascism and Nazism both as an ideology and a practice, and as “an enemy of the enemy.”³ [a reference to “The enemy of my enemy is my friend,” a view which did create some support for Nazi Germany among Arabs living under the yoke of French and British colonization.]

Those painting Arabs as heirs to Nazism use as “proof” one particular episode: the 1941 Baghdad “pogrom” (the Farhud). In April 1941, Iraqi pro-German nationalists led a coup against Iraq’s pro-British regent. Propaganda by the German legation, reinforced by the presence of the pro-Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem, had whipped up anti-Jewish feeling in Baghdad. British forces invaded Iraq, put the pro-German government to flight, and secured Baghdad, but their troops remained posted on the outskirts. Rumors circulated that the Jews were helping the much-hated British. There followed two days of killing and plunder; about 180 Jews were murdered. The rioters were stopped when Iraqi troops entered Baghdad and reestablished order, killing many of the mob.

Achcar notes that the vast majority of Muslim Iraqis condemned the violence and many protected their Jewish neighbors at the risk of their own lives. Looters from Baghdad’s slums, driven by need rather than anti-Jewish sentiment, joined in the action. With the regent back in power, the Iraqi government granted compensation to the families of Jewish victims.

Achcar’s account of the Farhud agrees with that of several authors, such as Nissim Rejwan, an Israeli writer of Baghdadi origin.⁴ There is little evidence that the Farhud was indicative of widespread and deeply rooted hatred toward Jews in the whole of “the Arab world.” Note that no anti-Jewish rioting occurred in any other Arab country during WWII, despite the calls to jihad broadcast from Berlin by the Mufti from November 1941 on.

In fact, Arabs played a truly remarkable role in defeating Hitler, a fact so carefully suppressed by the French after the war that I did not learn of it in 15 years of schooling in France. As part of De Gaulle’s Free French Forces, Arab troops from French North Africa contributed massively to the liberation of Europe. They fought alongside the Allies from the landing in Sicily in July 1943 to the invasion of Germany in 1945, with great loss of life. For instance, 233,000 of the 550,000 Free French troops landing on the Mediterranean coast in Nazi-occupied France in November 1944 were North African Muslims.⁵

The second part of Achcar’s book traces the rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab world after the founding of Israel in 1948. Western anti-Semitic themes, such as the “international Jewish conspiracy” of the fraudulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion, found their way into public discourse. Achcar does not excuse or minimize Arab anti-Semitism. He deplores the “abysmal stupidity” of these “anti-Semitic ravings or mindless denials of the Holocaust.” But do these ravings indicate an Arab wish to exterminate the Jews, a project they supposedly inherited from the Nazis? These claims are absurd, according to Achcar and many others. Nissim Rejwan, for instance, writes:

Neither their religious culture nor their historical record lends credence to the claim that the Muslim Arabs of today are capable of the kind of historical consummation that found expression in Auschwitz and other Nazi extermination camps … Viewed in anything like the correct historical perspective, the idea of “Arab Auschwitz” is an absurdity.⁶

And, of course, there are parallel ravings in Israeli/Jewish political discourse: referring to Arabs by animal names, calling for their expulsion and annihilation, and so on. See Israeli General Rafael Eitan’s infamous statement: “When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do about it will be to scurry around like drugged cockroaches in a bottle.”⁷

Achcar writes: “There are more anti-Semites among the Arabs today than among any other population group—for obvious historical reasons” [emphasis mine].⁸ These historical reasons, which are indeed obvious, were they not again and again obfuscated by pro-Israel apologists, include: Israel’s ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinian Arabs in 1948-1949 and its systematic destruction of 418 Palestinian villages to prevent the refugees’ return: creating 300,000 more Palestinian refugees in 1967; a brutal and tyrannical occupation accompanied by continued ethnic cleansing ever since; and atrocities against civilian populations in wars in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, and Lebanon.

Contemporary Arab anti-Semitism is not unmotivated, atavistic hatred. It is rooted in anger at Israel’s very real aggressive and destructive policies. Even Bernard Lewis, a historian favored by defenders of Israel, wrote “for Christian anti-Semites, the Palestine problem is a pretext and an outlet for their hatred; for Muslim anti-Semites, it is the cause.”⁹ Remove the cause—that is, end Israel’s ethnocentrism and expansionism—and Arab anti-Semitism would likely fade away.

Achcar shows how Arab anti-Semitism is “reactive” and changeable—dependent on Israel’s actions, its violence, its propaganda (e.g., calling Arabs “Nazis”), and on the particular historical and political circumstances of the various Arab/Muslim countries. It is not “the fantasy-based hatred of the Jews that was and still is typical of European racists.”¹⁰

I surmise that The Arabs and the Holocaust was written with an Arab audience in mind as well as a Western one. The book has been translated into Arabic and it is, among other things, an attempt to build bridges, a call for each side to listen to the other. He writes:

It is faith in human reason that justifies the hope that what counts as truth on one side of the Green Line or, rather, of the separation wall, will not forever count as error on the other.¹¹

In the conclusion, describing “statist Zionism” as “a Janus, one face turned toward the Holocaust, the other toward the Nakba, one toward persecution endured, the other toward persecution inflicted,” Achcar returns to the need for each side to acknowledge the sufferings of the other:

Only recognition of both of Janus’ faces—of the Holocaust and the Nakba—can bring Israeli, Palestinians, and other Arabs in genuine dialogue.¹²

Achcar’s book displays a formidable knowledge of the currents of thought on both sides of the Arab/Jewish divide as well as a brilliant analytic mind. By placing Arab attitudes toward the Holocaust in historical and psychological contexts, he opens up vistas to Western readers beyond the shallow, warped views of U.S. main media. He understands and has compassion for the historical wounds of the Jews. His integrity and openness shine throughout.

Hasbara

The authors of the FrontPageMag article, Cinnamon Stillwell and Rima Greene, seem not to be concerned about historical context. They mix innuendo, distortion and falsehood, quote out of context and misquote, then add in one or another point of dogma. They do not at any point counter Achcar with contrary evidence. Instead, they speak in generalities, e.g., Achcar’s book “masks its outlandish conclusions with scholarly apparatus while confirming the biases of the left-leaning, anti-Israel Middle East studies establishment.”

The “Hasbara Handbook: Promoting Israel on Campus” (hasbara is Hebrew for “public relations, “ or “propaganda”), published in 2002 by the World Union of Jewish Students, gives advice on how to score points “whilst avoiding genuine discussion”: rather than addressing your opponent’s arguments, make “as many comments that are positive about Israel as possible whilst attacking certain Palestinian positions, and attempting to cultivate a dignified appearance”; repeat points again and again, “If people hear something often enough, they come to believe it.” The same tactics seem to be used in the writing of most FrontPageMag articles.

Nakba vs. Holocaust

Stillwell and Greene write: “Achcar concluded by drawing an asinine correlation between the Holocaust … and the ‘Nakba’ or ‘catastrophe,’ the Arabic term to describe the creation of the state of Israel: ‘The Shoah ended in 1945, but the suffering of the Palestinians is never-ending.’”

In fact, Achcar, in his talk characterized the Nakba as “fortunately not a genocide, but what we could call an act of ethnic cleansing.” He went on to say that real dialogue conducive to peace requires

the mutual recognition of the tragedies of each other without putting them on the same plane … because the magnitude of the Holocaust cannot be compared to that of the Nakba… Nevertheless, this does not diminish the importance of what Palestinians have suffered. Not only the ordeal of the Palestinians is continuing … But they went through … the worst kind of experience just recently in Gaza in the winter of 2008-2009.

In his book, Achcar condemns making “no distinction between colonialist usurpation of a territory and the racist extermination of a whole population.”¹³ He quotes Edward Said: “Who would want morally to equate mass extermination with mass dispossession?”¹⁴ But he also states that Palestinian suffering is ongoing, and getting worse.

In fact, it is rarely useful to compare the Holocaust and the ordeal of the Palestinians; it does not help us understand the reality of either. Sixty-four years have elapsed since the Nakba, 64 years during which Palestinians have been subjected to further wars, expulsions, and dispossession. They have been denied political, economic, and human rights. At present, in Gaza, 1.5 million people, half of them children, are imprisoned behind a 25-foot high fence and regularly attacked by Israeli drones and Apache helicopters, killed by fire from tanks and snipers on Gaza’s borders; in the West Bank, Palestinians are evicted from their land to make way for Israeli settlers who harass and kill with impunity; and East Jerusalem is being “judaized,” i.e., emptied of its Palestinian inhabitants.

This is not genocide, but what name is there for it?

Anti-Arab racism in Israel

Stillwell and Greene claim that, unlike anti-Semitism in the Arab world, “’anti-Arab attitudes in Israel’ are neither widespread, [nor] promulgated through state-provided education and other official means.” But all polls of Israeli Jews reveal deep anti-Arab feeling. For instance, the Israel Democracy Institute released a poll in January 2011, which found that nearly half of Israeli Jews would not want to live next door to an Arab.¹⁵ Racism is strongest among the young: the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported that civics teachers around the country were complaining of rampant, virulent anti-Arab racism amongst their Jewish students.¹⁶

Nuri Peled-Elhanan, an Israeli professor of education and author of a book on Israeli school books,¹⁷ thinks “state-provided education” is a main culprit in promoting racism. Interviewed in the Guardian, she said Israeli school books describe Arabs “as vile and deviant and criminal, people who don’t pay taxes, people who live off the state, people who don’t want to develop… The only representation is as refugees, primitive farmers and terrorists.”

She added: “One question that bothers many people is how do you explain the cruel behavior of Israeli soldiers towards Palestinians, an indifference to human suffering, the inflicting of suffering. … I think the major reason for that is education.”

“Other official means” of promulgating racism include laws that are the very foundation of the Israeli state: the 1950 Law of Return and 1952 Citizenship Law, which allow every Jew in the world to immigrate to Israel and become an Israeli citizen. These same laws forbid the return of Palestinians who were forced to flee their homes from 1947 to 1952. This inequity may have made sense to those in the West who lived through the years after WWII, when the horrors of the Holocaust and general acceptance of colonialism blinded almost everyone to the injustice perpetrated against Palestinian Arabs. But it is much past time to look at the situation through Palestinian eyes.

More recent laws show racism becoming increasingly institutionalized in Israel. Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reports that “the current government coalition has proposed a flood of new racist and discriminatory bills.” One such bill legalizes “admission committees” operating in nearly 700 small towns, allowing them to reject applicants deemed “unsuitable to the social life of the community … or the social and cultural fabric of the town”—for “unsuitable applicants,” read principally “Arabs.”¹⁸

Holocaust denial, Nakba denial

Israel’s recent Nakba Law effectively forbids the public commemoration of the Nakba. Israel lodged a protest when UN secretary-general Ban Ki-Moon used the word in a telephone conversation with Mahmoud Abbas on May 2008, the 60th anniversary of the Nakba. Tzipi Livni, then Israel’s foreign minister, declared: “The Palestinians can celebrate an Independence Day if, on that day, they eliminate the word Nakba from their vocabulary.”

Speaking with her usual icy self-assurance, Livni was essentially telling the Arab minority to shut up about a fact no historian denies, not even Zionist historian Benny Morris, who said: “I don’t think that the expulsions of 1948 were war crimes. You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”¹⁹ Because she speaks as a government minister of a state with a very powerful military and several hundred nuclear weapons, her pronouncements are alarming.

Livni makes luminously clear that Israel is not a democracy for all its citizens. For the Jews, yes, although the rights of dissenters are increasingly restricted. In effect, “a Jewish and democratic state” is an oxymoron, no matter how much ink has been spent to deny it: a state so defined must privilege the Jews over other citizens. And being Jewish is unlike being, for example, French. One can become French by participating in the country’s communal life for five years, but there is no way to become Jewish and qualify for the Law of Return except by converting to Judaism, or by being “a child and a grandchild of a Jew, the spouse of a Jew, the spouse of a child of a Jew, and the spouse of a grandchild of a Jew.”

Israel: innocent, victimized, maligned …

Gail Rubin J.D. author of the BlueTruth article, waxes indignant at Achcar for describing Israel as a “’settler colonial project’ built on ‘Arab land,’” and “accusing Zionists of ‘ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.’”

That Israel was built on Arab land, whether bought or confiscated, is undeniable. As for “ethnic cleansing,” Benny Morris, who argued in his early books that the Palestinians had fled because of the war, now concedes the role of deliberate Zionist policy: “I have concluded that pre-1948 thinking had a greater effect on what happened in 1948 than I had allowed for…”²⁰

In any case, no one denies that Israel prevented the return of refugees, a violation of international law. It was Israeli policy to shoot as “infiltrators” Palestinians trying to return to their villages in the night. Hundreds of villages were destroyed to foreclose their former inhabitants’ return.

Arguments about the colonial nature of the Israeli state usually take the form of semantic nitpicking. Sociologist Maxime Rodinson, a French Jew who first broke the taboo against calling Israel a “colonial-settler state,” concludes his remarkable 1967 essay:

… the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the European-American movement of expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other people or to dominate them economically and politically. This is, moreover, an obvious diagnosis, and if I have taken so many words to state it, it is only because of the desperate efforts that have been made to conceal it.²¹

Stillwell and Greene recommend a review of Achcar’s book by “atypical professors” Matthias Küntzel and Colin Meade. The lengthy review²² takes up the themes of Küntzel’s book, Jihad and Jew-hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the roots of 9/11, such as: Islamist movements—al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran’s regime—originated in the lethal link between Islamism and Nazism; the Arabs have inherited “eliminatory anti-Semitism” from the Nazis; jihadism and jihadist anti-Semitism are the greatest threats to the world today. According to Achcar, his book is “a fantasy-based narrative pasted together out of secondary sources and third-hand reports.”²³

In Küntzler’s view, responsibility for the Palestine-Israel conflict lies entirely with the Palestinians and Arabs:

… it is not the escalation of the Middle East conflict that has given rise to anti-Semitism; it is rather anti-Semitism that has given rise to the escalation of the Middle East conflict – again and again…. In fact, what we are seeing is the revival of Nazi ideology in a new garb.²⁴

This is yet another version of the myth that Israel acts only in response to Arab aggression. In fact, following the conquest of land and expulsion of its native Arab inhabitants, Israel again and again inflicted great harm on Arabs and Muslims—primarily the Palestinians, but also those living in the border states—through actions that cannot be attributed to Israel’s need to survive. Consider the annexation of Jerusalem, a city sacred to Islam; the occupation of the Palestinian territories and of the Golan Heights; and wars such as that against Lebanon in 2006, supposedly a response to the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers that resulted in 1,200 Lebanese deaths, almost all of them civilians.

One example provides strong evidence that Arabs have not inherited the Nazis’ exterminatory will. The 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, re-endorsed unanimously by the Arab League in 2007,²⁵ calls upon Israel to withdraw from all the territories occupied since 1967, and for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The Arab countries would then commit to establishing normal relations with Israel and provide security for all the states of the region. Israel is entreated to accept the initiative to “[enable] the Arab countries and Israel to live in peace and good neighborliness and provide future generations with security, stability and prosperity.” The initiative calls for “a just solution to the Palestinian refugee problem,” but expresses support for any negotiated settlement between Israel and Palestinians.

It is difficult to find exterminatory anti-Semitism in all this. Unsurprisingly, Israeli politicians have ignored the initiative.

All signs point to the fact that Israel has never wanted an equitable peace settlement. Israeli governments since Israel’s beginnings, including Labor governments, have all acted to further the goal of a Greater Israel empty of Palestinians.

The how and why of pro-Israel watchdogs on campuses

Pro-Israel propaganda outlets like Frontpage Magazine carry little weight with scholars of the Middle East, but they are significant actors in sustaining the upside-down view of the Israel-Palestine conflict in America. They use intimidation to inhibit free speech on campuses, and poison the well of public discourse.

They advise students to take notes and report on professors, which especially intimidates junior, untenured faculty. They post on their websites telephone numbers and e-mail addresses of departments and faculties which get harassed by angry phone calls and swamped by hate mail.

Pipes and Horowitz encourage confrontation and creating disturbances, followed by complaints that their freedom of speech was curtailed. So here is Gail Rubin’s account of the Q&A part of Achcar’s talk at UC, Davis:

… challenging questions were not welcomed during the Q & A. I was abruptly censored while attempting to establish facts to challenge Mr. Achcar’s skewed conclusion that the Grand Mufti’s anti-Semitism had only a minimal impact on both Jews and Arabs. Professors Miller and Biale angrily told me the questions were insulting and to either stop or leave the room.

In fact, according to Jewish Studies Director, Professor Diane Wolf, Rubin was called on to ask her question, read a prepared script with no relation to Achcar’s talk, and then asked him whether he wasn’t blaming the Holocaust on the Jews. As he started to express that he was shocked and offended, she tried to re-read her statement. At this point, Professor David Biale and others told her to be quiet and Professor Susan Miller explained that in an academic environment, we wait for the speaker’s response to a question. She should leave if she could not abide by those rules. So the questioner was stopped only when she interrupted Achcar to repeat her statement.

In an interview after Achcar’s program, Professor Emily Gottreich, Vice Chair of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Berkeley, commented that if these campus pro-Israel activists were truly interested in engaging in academic dialogue, they would express their disagreements directly to the scholar in a public forum or to departmental chairs or program directors; instead, they appeal directly to donors, who tend to be neither Middle East experts nor particularly well-versed in the rules of academic discourse, to withdraw funding; or they approach university presidents or chancellors with accusations of anti-Semitism and “biased” scholarship.

Campus Watch and Horowitz’ Freedom Center are only two pieces in a large network of pro-Israel pressure groups operating on campuses. The Israel on Campus Coalition includes no less than 33 independent organizations, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and Anti-Defamation League (but not Horowitz’ or Pipes’ organizations, whose work may not quite fit the coalition’s image). The coalition works “to engage leaders at colleges and universities around issues affecting Israel, and to create positive campus change for Israel.”

Why this vast deployment of resources on campuses? The answer is straightforward. A recent document by the David Project, dedicated to ensuring that “effective support for Israel thrives on campuses and in our communities,” states: “AIPAC has had a successful track record in building campus ties to future members of Congress and campus leaders.”²⁶ To-morrow’s leaders are on campuses today, so the thinking goes, and they must be reached by Israeli propaganda as early as possible.

Changing Americans’ view of who Palestinians are

Philip Weiss, founder and co-editor of Mondoweiss.net, a website of news about Israel/Palestine, recounts a Skype-mediated “meeting” with youth in Gaza: “Most of the questions were from young men. They were smart but slightly abstract questions … Then Rawan Yaghi sat at the microphone and asked, What can be done to change Americans’ view of who Palestinians are?”

Weiss writes of being overcome with emotion by this “poised young woman wearing wire-rimmed glasses, 18 years old … There was such delicacy to her manner and her question … I struggled against upwelling emotions to answer her question. ‘`This is the biggest question of all, and I don’t know the answer.’”

For all of us living outside the prison of Gaza, this young woman’s question should come as a call to remember the immense harm created by prejudice, ignorance, and demonization. Voices like Gilbert Achcar’s must be heard on campuses and in larger public arenas.

1. Fear, Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, Center for American Progress, August 2011.
2. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 33.
3. Israel Gershoni, “Beyond Anti-Semitism: Egyptian Responses to German Nazism and Italian Fascism in the 1930s” (EUI Working Paper no. RSC 20001/32, San Domenico, 2001, p.6.
4. Nissim Rejwan, The Jews of Iraq: 3000 years of history and culture. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1985.
5. Benjamin Stora, L’armée d’Afrique: Les oubliés de la Libération, ‪Volume 692 of Textes et documents pour la classe TDC. ‪C.N.D.P., 1995.
6. Nissim Rejwan, Arabs aims and Israeli attitudes. The Leonard Davis Institute, Davis Occasional Papers, No 77, 2000.
7. “Israel Washes Away the Sins of Former Army Chief of Staff,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2005.
8. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 274.
9. Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice. Reissued with new afterword. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999. p. 259.
10. Achcar, p. 275.
11. Achcar, p. 273.
12. Achcar, p. 291.
13. Achcar, p. 130.
14. Achcar, The Arabs and the Holocaust, p. 26.
15. “Israeli intolerance shows up on Internet, in Knesset, on the street,” Los Angeles Times, January 23, 2011.
16. Tomer Velmer, “Student’s answer on civics test: Death to Arabs,” YNet Magazine, January 19, 2011.
17. Nurit Elhanan-Peled, Palestine in Israeli School Books: Ideology and Propaganda in Education. Library of Modern Middle East Studies, 2012.
18. “The Inequality Report,” Adalah, March 2011. See also “New Discriminatory Laws and Bills in Israel,” June 2011. Both can be downloaded from Adalah.
19. “Survival of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris,” with 
Ari Shavit, Logos 3.1, Winter 2004.
20. Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited, p. 5.
21. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, New York: Monad Press, 1973.
22. “In the Straightjacket of Anti-Zionism,” on the website of Engage, “a resource that aims to help people counter the boycott Israel campaign.” Küntzel’s book Jihad and Jew-hatred, translated by Colin Mead, was published by Telos Press Publishing (2008).
23. Achcar, p. 169-170.
24. From a talk given at Yale University, “Hitler’s Legacy: Islamic Antisemitism in the Middle East.”
25. Arab Peace Initiative.
26. “A Burning Campus? Rethinking Israel Advocacy at America’s Universities and Colleges,” 2012.

Many writers have exposed the role architecture plays in controlling public space. Mike Davis discusses how cities have installed public benches designed to discourage sleeping and fenced in public parks. Israeli architect Eyal Weizman has studied the nature of control implicit in Israel’s design of its cities, settlements and highways. Fictionally, China Mieville’s The City and the City is a riveting tale of a future place strikingly reminiscent of today’s occupied Palestine. Most recently, economist and critic David Harvey has contributed a refreshingly new look at the nature of the modern city and, more importantly, why they need to be wrested back from the neoliberal corporate megalith currently trying to buy the world.

Harvey, who has lived in Baltimore, Maryland for the past several decades, places the modern city’s economic role directly in the center of capital’s creation and consumption of surplus. He discusses the claim that cites are the product of the proletarianization of the rural peasantry, pointing to industrial revolutions of the past and the current movement of populations in nations such as China and India from the countryside to existing urban areas and new economic zones created by international capitalism. Furthermore, his text, titled Rebel Cities, provides a look at the growth of so-called shantytowns on the outskirts of some of the world’s largest population centers. These shantytowns are often the focus of raids by military and police forces intent on making it easier for bulldozers behind them to destroy the structures found there. In certain instances, however, the authorities have conceded to the citizens of these shantytowns and given them rights to their homes.

It is from these shantytowns that we can gain inspiration. The people who live in such areas are considered surplus in the world of monopoly capitalism. They have no rights as far as the stock exchanges and bourses of the world are concerned. Yet, because they refuse to accede to this characterization, they will struggle to maintain their shelter, their communities and their human dignity. Like their historical predecessors in the Paris Commune of 1871, this population is determined to make the city a popular and democratic human organism. They are joined by those around the world who in the past couple of years have occupied city squares and parks and demanded a reconceptualization of the city, more democratic control of the urban space, and a reconsideration of who constitutes the working class and, subsequently, who will make the anti-capitalist revolution.

Harvey insists that the only genuine anticapitalist struggle is one with the goal of destroying the existing class relationship. Such a struggle cannot be waged by separating workplace issues from those of the community. Pointing to the classic film The Salt Of the Earth as an example of how the latter scenario might occur, Harvey suggests that the union must view the world of working people as an organic whole. Utility access and costs are workplace issues; childcare and education are too. Affordable housing and food costs are more than secondary concerns. Their role as a means for the capitalist system to take back wages describes their existence as a means for that system to maintain its control on working people. Debt peonage, whether incurred via education and vehicle loans in the advanced capitalist world or incurred via a micro-loan program in the developing nations, is still debt peonage. The increasing cost of post-secondary education throughout the world and the mortgage crisis are both tools of the neoliberal regime to continue the upward motion of capital.

This is a radical book. Its discussion ranges from the workings of the monopoly rent system and the nature of neoliberal capitalism to a call to take back the city. History is combined with economics and a call for serious struggle. With the Paris Commune as his inspiration, David Harvey discusses the positive and negative aspects of the Occupy movement, the squatters’ movements and allied struggles. He presents their historical precedents and he warns against essentially conservative attempts to manipulate such movements into supporting the existing economic reality. He further opines that cooptation by parliamentary elements are proof of these movements success, not their failure. Fundamental to all of this is Harvey’s radical definition of the city as the wellspring of capitalist oppression and also the foundation of resistance to that oppression.

Like many acculturated Americans, I was familiar with Robeson as an entertainer; his rendition of “Ol’ Man River” from Showboat (written by Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern in 1927) is considered an American classic. The dirgeful ballad describes the toil and strife of the black slave working the gambling ferry boats:

Colored folks work on de Mississippi,
Colored folks work while de white folks play,
Pullin’ dose boats from de dawn to sunset,
Gittin’ no rest till de judgement day.

In the score this refrain is marked optional; replaced with “[a] musical part” depending on the whim of the director, in deference to audiences perhaps not comfortable with this rendition. This “comfort level” is the driving force of acceptance of Othered minorities as citizens, as well as their presence within cultural manifestations and national mythologies. The allowance or not of these couplets speaks of an understood ever-shifting limit of tolerance, the tolerated never quite alloted full freedom.

From this vantage point, the recent presidential election takes on a different significance, the opposite of current received wisdom, that a historic event has taken place with the election of a black American as marking a “post-race” America. Barack Obama’s election instead represents a similar “limit of tolerance”, based on the behavior, thought, and action of the one tolerated. His mediation* as a new “ideal” on the other hand, wholly separate from actions which make him hard to differentiate from his predecessors, and removed from the mood on the street and realities suffered on the ground, is, in this light, not a contradiction.

One month before the election in 2008 I stopped into a hip-hop clothing store in Bloomfield, New Jersey. Various T-shirts sported the visage of Obama along with statements of pride and hope. “My President Is Black” read one, against the backdrop of an American flag, and with the words “The American Dream” on the reverse. This explosion in production of T-shirts and signage outside of the licensing purview of the Democratic National Committee¹ bears witness more to the weight placed on Obama’s shoulders than belief in “Hope” or “Change”. On the wall of the shop was a graffitied art piece reflecting Obama’s perceived political peers: Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela. To peer into Obama’s future we simply have to examine King, sadly reduced post-mortem to a shill for Alcatel and Cingular, and Mandela, who now serves a similar function as an ideal wholly removed from the realities of a post-apartheid South Africa, currently morphed into a neo-liberal and globalized nightmare.

Malcolm X, on the other hand, represented in image as well as in word and deed something much closer to the reality of lived life for many in the country, as stated in his famous “Ballot or the Bullet” speech in 1964:

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver–no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare….

Reframed, these T-shirts thus become a grassroots manifestation of the poet Langston Hughes’s The Dream Deferred;² they implicitly contain the projection of what might happen if the dream is put off any longer. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of an Obama presidency.

Malcolm X also happens to be the only Black activist in the USPS booklet (this due to lobbying efforts), nonetheless painstakingly described therein as a “lifelong criminal” who did time in prison before his conversion to Islam. No mention is made of his assassination, perhaps due to his prescient description of the assassination of John Kennedy as America’s “chickens [coming] home to roost”. This was echoed by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright who said the same about the attack on the World Trade Center, and Like Malcolm X and Paul Robeson, Reverend Wright also suffered a smear campaign to paint him as a threat to the nation.

Full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations

Part of what marks X, King, Robeson, and even Obama is their not matching their bestowed stereotype. In his book Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto (Harper Torchbooks, 1966), Gilbert Osofsky states:

What was most striking about the Negro stereotype was the way it portrayed a people in an image so totally the reverse of what Americans considered worthy of emulation and recognition. The major and traditional American values were all absent from the Negro stereotype. The Negro was conceived of as lazy in an ambitious culture; improvident and sensuous in a moralistic society; happy in a sober world; poor in a nation that offered riches to all who cared to take them; childlike in a country of men…. Negroes hoped for full acceptance in a culture which mocked their aspirations.

The condition of the American black man was a function not just of racism, but of a built-in inability of those so tagged to voice or discuss the nature of the problem; an inversion in which the dominant discourse promulgated stereotypes which were subsumed within the dominated culture itself, and then further assumed and re-characterized by the targeted group in question.

It is only relatively recently that we are witnessing documentation of Robeson and his work–time having defused any revolutionary potential here–along with one of the first stars of an entertainment realm that tolerated black performance: Bert Williams. In 1903 Williams staged a musical comedy entitled In Dahomey that was so successful it forced the racial integration of many theaters in the States. Simultaneously, W.E.B. DuBois was seeing the birth of a Black cultural awakening in such work. In an essay from 1916 entitled “The Drama Among Black Folk”, he wrote:

In later days Cole and Johnson and Williams and Walker lifted minstrelsy by sheer force of genius into the beginnings of a new drama. White people refused to support the finest of their new conceptions like the “Red Moon” and the cycle apparently stopped. Recently, however, with the growth of a considerable number of colored theatres and moving picture places, a new and inner demand for Negro drama has arisen which is only partially satisfied by the vaudeville actors….The next step will undoubtedly be the slow growth of a new folk drama built around the actual experience of Negro American life.

This cultural expression, wrested from the dominant class, spoken in its own language, and directed inward in terms of audience was the de facto segregated black nation attempting to stand on its own feet and create its own place, speak in its own voice. For this reason it could not be tolerated. Dubois’s appeals for funds for such a theater went unheeded; audiences wished to see re-affirmation of their view of black Americans, as shaped by white actors in blackface makeup. The stillborn theatrical awakening was reduced even further to the horrific tragedy of actors such as Williams smearing oily burnt cork ash on their own [not] black [enough] faces.

This inversion of Black culture through the mediation of the white artist is evident as well in Porgy and Bess, an opera about Black life (written by George Gershwin and DuBose Heyward in 1935). In a biography of George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, the jazz-era band leader stated, “the times are here to debunk Gershwin’s lampblack Negroisms.” Similarly, when listened to outside of the dominant discourse such as on the radio show L’épopée des musiques noires broadcast on Radio France Internationale,³ such artists speak openly of the racism that they suffered and which continues to plague them. That Duke Ellington successfully staged all-black musicals that rose above the minstrel dross remains lost within history; meanwhile, Showboat and Porgy and Bess have replaced actual historical memory.⁴

Black to the future

This specter of white men in black face rises every so often as a reminder and as a warning, but also as a marker of white privilege defended as “free speech”, as in the case of firefighters on Long Island who wore Afro wigs and black face in a community parade in the late ’80s:

The police commissioner’s management authority has been undermined by federal Judge John Sprizzo’s June 23 ruling, following a non-jury trial, that the city did not have the right to fire a police officer and two firefighters who rode in blackface and wore Afro wigs on a parade float in 1988. Police Officer Joseph Locurto and the two firefighters were punished, wrote Sprizzo, “in retaliation for engaging in protected speech.” This “protected speech” involved being part of a float with the banner “Black [sic] to the Future: Broad Channel 2098,” which the defendants said was a parody of black racial integration into the mainly white Broad Channel neighborhood. They threw watermelon and fried chicken at parade goers and, as the parade was ending, a firefighter grabbed the back of the truck and dangled himself toward the ground, re-enacting the brutal dragging murder of a black man in Texas two months earlier.

Although we might not remember the vaudeville circuits of the early 20th century, this news item attests to the lingering epithets and uglinesses that were used to disparage blacks of that period. Their deep-seatedness is revealed in the non-reaction to their use, and the ensuing disapproval if not dismissal of the discussion that might follow such an event. This legally protected “free speech” leaves no humanizing aspect untargeted, by referring directly to black stage characters and their disempowering nicknames (Step-‘n’-Fetch-It, Jim Crow); to the sight of white eyes peering out of black face ([rac]coon); to the percentage of black blood in a person’s bloodstream (high yellow, quadroon); to one’s renegade slave background (maroon). Furthermore, the “reverse” of this often used as a defense, namely, disparaging terms for whites, are few in number, hardly as powerful, and are by contrast comical in their ineffectiveness.

This brings up the main point of any such discussion of representation, which cannot be limited to its visual or aural perception: the power differential involved. Who is the audience, and where do they fit societally speaking? What is my physical, technical, and economic ability to reach them? What are the various legal rights that enable and/or impinge such communication? What is my privilege to make such a statement, and what personal, communal, moral, etc. limitations might I place on myself before doing so? What is my luxury to so speak, above and beyond these other aspects of such expression?

Examples of unspoken referents thus weigh even heavier, in the sense that one need not even speak to evoke the same racist sentiment: Confederate flags flying over southern state capitol buildings (or in hidden locations out of public view); separated primary elections that reflect the class breakdown of the political parties along racial lines; the voting down of a federal holiday commemorating Martin Luther King (“states’ rights” makes direct reference to George Wallace’s statement of “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever”); the practice of diluting minority power via the gerrymandering of electoral districts; the use of scare tactics at the polls; the prohibition of the vote for felons; etc.

The equivalent disparity of direct expression within the culture, along similar overt as well as covert lines, includes endless examples: Billie Holiday used to relate how she was run out of Mobile, Alabama for singing “Strange Fruit” (written by Abel Meeropol in 1937), a song about the infamous practice of lynching. In Louisiana more recently, black students were convicted and imprisoned for their protest and reaction to a noose being hung from a tree on the school lawn; this “warning” to the black student population came after they decided to assemble underneath the “white student’s” tree. A super-mediated* discussion of the word “nigger” took place when Michael Richards (Kramer from the television show Seinfeld), not happy with some black hecklers, informed them that “fifty years ago we’d have you upside down with a fucking fork up your ass.” More disturbing are the commemorative postcards made from photographs of hanged men, these “black bodies swinging/in the Southern breeze”, surrounded by smiling white faces as might be seen at a picnic or a communal pigsticking, and today disturbingly mimicked by images from Abu Ghaib prison in Iraq, as well as of soldiers in Afghanistan posing with corpses.

A share of the wealth and a piece of the action

It should thus come as no surprise that during the Democratic primaries of 2008, Andrew Cuomo made reference to Barack Obama’s “shuck and jive”, a phrase which has no meaning outside of imposed black vaudeville dialect for shiftiness and evasiveness, making semantic reference to costume change, rapid dance steps, and a fancy ability with words. The attorney general’s disavowal of the term as racist is contradicted by his former statement that voting for his [black] rival for the New York governor’s race, Carl McCall, would result in a “racial contract” between Black and Hispanic Democrats which “can’t happen”.⁵ Similar was the statement from Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland that Obama seemed “uppity”. Everyone who speaks American English completes this noun phrase with the one epithet that follows, explicitly referring to a black man who should “know his role”.

These terms and images are so loaded that they only need be hinted at to get the message across; even in their denial they hit the target and leave their mark. The resulting backtracking can be seen to be prefigured; meaning they are planned if not staged, the knowledge remains that exculpation awaits for simply denouncing the action of having stated them, or else by labeling the targets thereof as “oversensitive”, “politically correct”, or “racist” themselves. In this way, the legacy of the ignoble practices and codes of that time most assuredly live on, as a chronic condition of the culture itself; the equivalent of linguistic sucker punches such as “I would never refer to my opponent as a Communist.”⁶

Then candidate Obama listlessly defended himself against such provocations, and was rewarded with the presidency. In stark contrast, no U.S. postage stamp, indeed, few American history books represent any leader from the Black Power movements of the 1960s, and this despite the acknowledgment at that time by then president Richard Nixon, who used the term Black Power in a speech attempting to subvert the movement at its core:

[M]uch of the Black militant talk these days is actually in terms far closer to the doctrines of free enterprise than to those of the welfarist thirties–terms of “pride”, “ownership”, “private enterprise”, “capital”, “self-assurance”, “self-respect”… What most of these militants are asking is not separation, but to be included in–not as supplicants, but as owners, as entrepreneurs–to have a share of the wealth and a piece of the action. And this is precisely what the Federal central target of the new approach ought to be. It ought to be oriented toward more Black ownership, for from this can flow the rest–Black pride, Black jobs, Black opportunity and yes, Black power…⁷

The actuality is better known: the former Black Power movement leaders have either been assassinated or put in prison, have come around to parrot the dominant discourse, or have retreated to obscurity and/or academia; all have been rendered place-less, historically silenced and disappeared. Similarly, if no one remembers the black musicians of jazz, blues, funk, gospel, etc. that the U.S. Postal Service attempts to pay tribute to, everyone on the other hand knows their white stand-ins, their role-reversers: Elvis, Joe Cocker, The Rolling Stones, Eminem, etc. To reinforce this diminishment, blacks of a certain celebrity are often referred to as the shadow of their white counterparts, especially in terms of politics and culture: “the black Daniel Webster” applied to Samuel Ringgold Ward, or “the black Callas”, attributed to Barbara Hendricks, or now, “the black Kennedy”, in a reflection of racial privilege, and the one-way directional flow of cultural appropriation and political designation.

The rainbow sign

In one such Black spiritual now forgotten, God gives Noah the “Rainbow Sign” that ends his estrangement from the land; however the sign comes with a warning that He is done with water, promising “the fire next time”. In his book of the same name, James Baldwin describes Malcolm X’s relationship with the United States thus:

Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals’ attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge–revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. When Malcolm X, who is considered the movement’s second-in-command, and heir apparent, points out that the cry of “violence” was not raised, for example, when the Israelis fought to regain Israel, and, indeed, is raised only when black men indicate that they will fight for their rights, he is speaking the truth. The conquests of England, every one of them bloody, are part of what Americans have in mind when they speak of England’s glory. In the United States, violence and heroism have been made synonymous except when it comes to blacks, and the only way to defeat Malcolm’s point is to concede it and then ask oneself why this is so….there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forebearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary. The real reason that non-violence is considered a virtue in Negroes…is that white men do not want their lives, their self-image, or their property threatened.

Here Baldwin presages the purely symbolic non-threatening black man who will be acceptable in the United States. Another such example, Bill Cosby, echoes this when he states that “all the problems [on his TV show] were not solved, but were dealt with without violence.” In contrast to the [acceptable] violence of Israel and England (which too has its own “Jerusalem”⁸ ) Baldwin reveals what is most threatening about the landless or placeless minority nations within Anglo-Saxon realms. More importantly, he reveals society’s inherent fear of those who have similarly examined the topic of self-representation (Ture, Fanon, Roy, Dabashi, etc.), and who conclude that violence is, perhaps, the only possible reaction to greater violences both actual and virtual suffered by the oppressed.

We’re here without any rights

This discussion of violence controlled by those who have the power to define the parameters for said violence brings us to Sacha Cohen, and his portrayal of an Arab leader in his movie The Dictator. In naming the dictator “Gen. Shabazz Aladeen”, pointed reference is made to the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X’s taken name, juxtaposed mockingly against the exoticized “Aladdin” (which removes any religious significance here). In an interview with Howard Stern Cohen states:

“All these dictators blame everything on the Zionists,” said Baron Cohen, “it’s a great scapegoat. Now, young people are saying the reason we’re not happy is we’re living in these dictatorships. There’s a guy who’s a trillion-aire who’s sleeping with models and actresses, and we’re here without any rights being persecuted.”

In a failed bid to play victim, Cohen instead reveals his “Arab-face” minstrelsy; his portrayal of stereotypes are in fact directed at an audience the class of which has controlled the destiny of those living “under dictatorships” for the greater part of the last century, if not the past 500 years. The insinuation here is that such dictatorships are a function of the Arab inability to assume democracy (a great Orientalism, barely worthy of non-scholars such as Bernard Lewis) and claiming falsely that the region has no democratic or, indeed, socialist, pan-Arabist, anti-colonialist, etc. aspects to its past. It is too easy to discuss these neglected historical forces of liberation in the Arab and Muslim world to debunk such heinous racism–Mossadegh, Shari’ati, Fanon, Memmi, Nasser, etc. (among many, many others) all come quickly to mind–and this, coupled with the fact that the Third World’s leftist realm has been targeted for extermination for decades if not more than a century, only reinforces the hubris of Cohen’s statement.

In economic terms, it also reveals the power differential inherent to capitalism and globalization, and is reminiscent of Bill Cosby’s attacks on “bling”-style rap artists–he doesn’t even admit to their more political precursors–who have managed to acquire wealth and status by following all of the lessons learned in a neo-liberal society (similar to Mexican drug cartels, the Mafia, the Saudi monarchy, etc.) but who get punished when they become too competitive (like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan) and are thus rendered docile and brought within the domain of global Capital. “The trillionaire sleeping with models and actresses” is a glorified trope within American culture, so it is odd to find it given populist overtones as concerns the current Arab revolts and uprisings, as if we are to believe that in any way Sacha Cohen finds common cause with the Arab street.

The idea that the struggle against the colonial apartheid state of Israel, indeed, that the resistance to First-World globalizing dominance in the region as premised and foregrounded by the Palestinian struggle, might somehow be simplistically reduced to “criticism” of Zionism (in and of itself an ignoble ideology) is so Orwellian an inversion as to be unworthy of retort. There is no point wasting time considering the cultural “flip”, in imagining an Arab or Muslim “doing the same thing” culturally speaking; there is likewise no point in discussing the ridiculous concept of “reverse racism” when such debates require a thorough examination of said expression along economic and political lines. This, the power differential of the dominant culture as portrayed by that culture’s media, is the central point of this discussion, and however we might examine it, those who are minority, who are Other, fundamentally cannot rise above such representations as they are played out within this mediated system.

A critical black gaze

As a black American convert to Islam, Malcolm X, despite mediated attempts to historically reduce him, could very well be a case of a sub-mediated* image that survives such a pulverization, and as such, serves as a model to follow to bring us out of this quandary. As stated by bell hooks, in one of her essays concerning and quoting Malcolm X:

Understanding the power of mass media images as forces that can overdetermine how we see ourselves and how we choose to act, Malcolm X admonished black folks: “Never accept images that have been created for you by someone else. It is always better to form the habit of learning how to see things for yourself: then you are in a better position to judge for yourself.” Interpreted narrowly, this admonition can be seen as referring only to images of black folks created in the white imagination. More broadly, however, its message is not simply that black folks should interrogate only the images white folks produce while passively consuming images constructed by black folks; it urges us to look with a critical eye at all images. Malcolm X promoted and encouraged the development of a critical black gaze, one that would be able to move beyond passive consumption and be fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating.⁹

Proclaimed “hope” or promised “change” should not derail any criticism of the Image Machine, especially when this Machine has minimized minority histories to literally belittled images riding on tickets of commerce; to bogus misrepresentative celluloid trash; to symbolic representations of white privilege embodied in the heads of state and power: All the more reason we must be “fiercely confronting, challenging, interrogating…look[ing] with a critical eye at all images”.

The answer to such racism lies not in a faux multi-culturalism, nor in a homogenizing, “borderless”, “nomadic” neo-liberalism. The answer lies in manifestations of resistance to this dominant culture which are able to pre-emptively prevent co-optation by the dominant discourse. Hamid Dabashi, in his book Post-Orientalism: Knowledge and Power in Time of Terror, states:

Out of this cul-de-sac, one possibility has always remained open: a creative re/constitution of cultural character and historical agency from a range of poetic and aesthetic possibilities, where the notion of the beautiful is violently wrested out of the banal, the sublime forcefully out of the ridiculous, agency defiantly out of servitude, subjection combatively out of humiliation.

This requires, however, that we change our perspective and our own viewpoint first; that we radically re-orient ourselves in terms our relationship to cultural consumption and its source. These manifestations as described by Dabashi are hard to suss out since we have unfortunately lost the ability to read them as such, for having been so long out of touch with our own creative potential, and for having forgotten the formerly “local” media manifestations of guerrilla television, public access cable, pirate radio, radical journals, homegrown theater, etc.

True to our native land

On January 30, 2009, in Denver, Colorado, a black woman was asked to sing the national anthem during the State of the City address by the mayor of Denver, John Hickenlooper.¹⁰ Instead of the Star-Spangled Banner, Rene Marie offered a rendition of the “black national anthem”, resulting in hate mail and an outcry denouncing her action. She stated that her decision was based on “how I feel about living in the United States, as a black woman, as a black person”. Further, she said that she would no longer sing the national anthem because she “often feels like a foreigner in the United States”.

The correct response of the mayor’s office should have been “this is her right; this is her freedom of speech”, like our blackfaced firemen, like Andrew Cuomo; this was not forthcoming. The song which originally debuted in 1900 is entitled, “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (words and music by John Johnson, ironically quoted in the benediction for Barack Obama’s inauguration ceremony), and it ends with the lyrics: “May we forever stand,/True to our God,/True to our native land.” This takes on a particularly humbling tone given the replacement of the previous attempts of minority Americans to leave their ghettoes with more current almost prideful acceptances of this, their “allowed” place.

This is manifested in the outlying reaches of Los Angeles–180 degrees removed from Cohen’s Hollywood–the scene of the Watts and Rodney King riots, and described in the music of Bambu¹¹ among many others, and where a “beautiful” form of dance was created from the “banal” by Tommy Johnston, aka “Tommy the Clown”, borrowing from stripper pole-dancing, although performed by both sexes, and used to entertain children and adults at birthday and block parties. The dance is referred to as clowning, and it went on to spawn another form of dance, angrier and reflective of street realities for a generation lost, often mimicking police beatings and other brutalities, called crumping. Both are performed by youth attempting to escape the reality of gang-controlled streets, where misuse of colors is a marker for murder, and choices of home, school, job, and future are systemically limited.

In the documentary about this dance form called Rize! the youth in the movie describe their lives imbued with a renascent spirituality, sense of purpose, and avoidance of the commercialization that has befallen previous expression from this community. Included in this film is the striking image of a black man now painting his face up in white clown makeup and not minstrel black burnt cork, referencing a forgotten cultural marker and not a racist imposition; following Malcolm’s advice to “never accept images that have been created for you by someone else.”

Speak from the street

And so as Arabs and Muslims now targeted with similar minstrelsies, we do ourselves no favor when we simply smear brown paint on our brown features in order to entertain the Master in the Master’s house; we perform no beneficent action by simply parroting endless mediated exchanges with little bark and less bite. Sacha Cohen would ironically represent all of us as tinpot dictators, when it is he, culturally, politically, economically, and in terms of class and avowed ideological affiliation, who has much more in common with this fetid realm of the world stage than does the majority of Arabs and Muslims on the planet. What does Sacha Cohen know about what is going on in his own backyard, much less this world in active revolt? Indeed, it is Cohen who needs to “know his role”.

While we point out this obvious classist and racist arrogance, we must also strive to find the countervailing non-mediated* representatives that exist closer to home and which speak from the street: the Egyptian women whose strikes in the textile mills (not Twitter) led to intifada; similarly the women of the neighborhoods surrounding Tahrir Square in Cairo whose cooking fed this revolution; the 70,000 Palestinian refugees marching to the Lebanese border in May of 2011; the owner of the last kufiyyeh factory¹² in occupied and embattled Al-Khalil, undone by sanctions and outdone by Chinese imports; the Syrian migrant workers slaving to build Beirut skyscrapers, far from their rural communities rightfully rising up in revolts kidnapped by regional powers; the Bedouin populations kept stateless and impoverished; Palestinian hunger strikers; etc. ad infinitum, all with their unique creative contributions of craft, art, music, graffiti, dance, calligraphy, song, poetry, spoken and written word, theater, etc.

For of this common resistance might rise the creative manifestations–the “new folk drama”–that feed back into the revolts against the likes of Sacha Cohen and his ilk who would define us and confine us; manifestations that do not allow simply for a misconstrued and patently false “comfort level” or status quo, that do not inadvertently sell us short, that do not continue to sell us out. In this is perhaps a great step forward, since, as Malcolm X asks of us, once the realization of such mediated deception and the unveiling of the deceivers hits home, once we move from defensive mode to rediscovering the energy that would be better put to creative output, once we wean ourselves from the source of our own misrepresentation, then we might actually recognize the creative source all around us; a new nahdah; proving with our creative action what we already know to be true in our thoughts and words. Paul Robeson, in control of his own creative manifestation in concert, changed the formal and staged lyrics of “Ol’ Man River” to better frame his feelings of being an outsider within American society. It is likewise time for our own re-imaging; our own reformulation; our own restaging.

* Mediation
Mediation defines expression as a function of the distance from direct sensorial witnessing, on a spectrum that ranges from non-mediated to super-mediated.

Non-mediated: A spontaneous expression that is not designed, pre-selected, edited, planned; the voicer of the unsaid.

Example(s): The spontaneous verbal utterance or physical actualization in reaction to witnessing a car accident; Kanye West going off-prompt during a televised fundraiser for the victims of hurricane Katrina, stating: “George Bush doesn’t care about Black people.”

Super-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned, possibly within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto or tenets, that may or may not stand in opposition to the dominant discourse, but whose use of tools, languages, systems, and technologies in fact are meant to enable, sustain, and promote such dominant discourse.

Example(s): The television show Cops with an episode concerning drunk driving; drivers’ education movies; a presidential press conference in the aftermath of Katrina.

Sub-mediated: Expression that is designed, pre-selected, edited, or planned within the constraints of a given group, its ideology, its manifesto, or tenets, that absolutely stands in opposition to the dominant discourse often in its uniqueness and its non-derivation from current customs or tropes, and which avoids or attempts to subvert the tools, languages, systems, and technologies of super-mediation.

Example(s): The white-painted ghost bikes of various cities that represent both the individual killed in an accident and their collective whole; the Legendary K.O’s rap song set to mashup videos for “George Bush Don’t Like Black People”.

1. “Dreaming XXL”; Jake Austen. Harper’s, November 2008. p. 58–59.
2. What happens to a dream deferred?/Does it dry up/Like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a sore–/And then run?/Does it stink like rotten meat?/Or crust and sugar over–/like a syrupy sweet?/Maybe it just sags/like a heavy load./Or does it explode?
3. The Story of Black Musics [sic].
4. Both musicals are featured as postage stamps. To note is that “First-day” issue of stamps exists for a very particular audience that collects such stamps for their value; this is a different audience than the subject of the stamps themselves.
5. Reference to this conversation taped by a reporter for the Jewish Forward. Interesting here and necessitating another treatise is the ability of Cuomo to claim “whiteness”, as opposed to his formerly equally marking ethnic identity.
6. Testimony of Paul Robeson before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
7. Black Liberation and Socialism, Ahmed Shawki.
8. William Blake poem and later hymn.
9. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations.
10. USA Today, January 31, 2009; “Controversy after singer substitutes ‘black national anthem’ for ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’
11. “Pull It Back.”
12. Kufiyeh project.

Born in 1837, in Cork, Ireland, the teenage Mary Harris and her family emigrated first to Toronto, Canada, then to the U.S., with stops in Monroe, Michigan and Chicago, before settling in Memphis, Tennessee, where Mary met and married George E. Jones, an ironworker and organizer for the National Union of Iron Moulders.

Mary opened a dressmaking shop in Memphis, in 1861, on the eve of the Civil War, fulfilling her dream of becoming a wife, mother and businesswoman.  Then tragedy struck.  Mary’s husband and four children (all of whom were under the age of five) died during a virulent yellow fever epidemic that swept through Memphis, leaving her a childless widow.

Following their deaths, and looking for a fresh start in a friendly environment, Mary returned to Chicago, where she set up another dressmaking business.  Then, incredibly, four years later, disaster struck again.  Mary’s dress shop, her home and her personal possessions were all lost in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

It was in the wake of these personal tragedies that Mary Harris Jones became heavily involved in the labor movement, initially as an organizer for the Knights of Labor, and then, with the Knights of Labor’s dissolution, as an organizer and spokeswoman for the United Mine Workers (UMW).  In truth, she was considerably more than a UMW organizer; she became the coal miners’ patron saint.

By all accounts Mary was a brilliant, charismatic speaker, and a fearless, dedicated champion of social justice.  The authorities (politicians, mine owners, business groups) were terrified of her.  In 1897, at the age of 60, she began using the name “Mother Jones,” and in 1902, a West Virginia District Attorney with the improbable name of Reese Blizzard, famously referred to her as “the most dangerous woman in America,” sealing her reputation.

One of Mary’s chief concerns was child welfare.  Not only was she an early and outspoken opponent of child labor, she took the maternal view that men’s wages should be generous enough to allow their wives to stay home and raise their children.  A brave and independent thinker—and unquestionably affected by the deaths of her four young ones—Mary shied away from many of the feminist issues of the day, including women’s suffrage, believing that a mother raising her children trumped everything else.

Although the word “iconic” tends to be overused these days, the term certainly applied to Mother Jones.  For roughly 60 years, she was the working man’s spiritual leader and benefactor—part Madonna, part mediator, part rabble-rouser—a labor icon in every sense of the word.  This brief summary of her career doesn’t do her justice.  Suffice to say that in an era of colorful, larger-than-life male figures, Mother Jones more than held her own.  She died in 1930, at the age of ninety-three.

A couple of labor activists and historians, Steve Fesenmaier (in West Virginia) and Sanford Berman (in Minnesota), have spearheaded a drive to have Mother Jones honored by a commemorative stamp.  I’ve spoken with both men by telephone and was impressed not only with their staggering knowledge of labor history, but with their perseverance.  They’ve been committed to this project for seven years.

What does it take for the USPS (United States Postal Service) to put you on a commemorative stamp?  Several things, actually.  You don’t have to be an American, and you don’t have to be an intellectual or moralist (Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, and Elvis have been on stamps), but you do have to be dead for a minimum of five years (although exceptions can be made for ex-presidents).

Commemorative stamps have been around since 1893.  Interestingly, you can’t  get on a stamp if you’re a religious figure.  The USPS has a policy of not issuing stamps for people who were known primarily for their religious beliefs, which means Billy Graham, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson are not eligible.

When atheists protested Mother Teresa getting her stamp, in 2010, the USPS was able to sidestep that potentially incendiary issue by claiming that the second-most famous Roman Catholic in the world (behind the Pope) was being honored for humanitarian rather than religious reasons.

The point that Messrs. Fesenmaier and Berman wish to emphasize is that the public can influence these selections.  There’s a group called the Citizen Stamp Advisory Committee, composed of approximately 15 people, that makes recommendations to the USPS.  People can write to this committee and suggest candidates.  If Duke Wayne and Elvis can get stamps, why not labor’s legendary benefactor, Mother Jones?

The mailing address is:

Citizens Stamp Advisory Committee:  Stamp Development
U.S. Postal Service
1735 North Lynn Street (Room 5013)
Arlington, VA 22209-6432

How times have changed since then with media monopolies lobotomizing news, the centralizing of newspaper and broadcast reporting which has created a corporate-protectorate, the looming death of independent publishers and book sellers, thanks partly to Amazon, and the evisceration of US mail delivery service, thanks to spineless Democrats, treasonous Libertarians and reckless Republicans.

In fact, much of the ugliness in the media associated with Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Coulter, Beck and Murdoch and mainstream corporate press shills is just back to the future in this country’s media history.

Let’s flip back 400 years when the first rags, newspapers, called for the murder of the land’s aborigines, inciting the white aliens to take land, burn villages and crucify the “sculking” and “barbarous” Indigenous peoples and “rebellious Negroes.”

A new book, sort of a first-of-its-kind, takes the reader on that journey to end up here in today’s day and age of a democratic crisis largely created by who controls the media, how people access news and information, and what narratives our citizens are actually “consuming” and why those narratives are slanted, misrepresented or scrubbed altogether by the SCLM – so-called liberal media.
“It is our contention that newspapers, radio, and television played a pivotal role in perpetuating racist views among the general population,” write Juan Gonzales and Jose Torres in their new well researched and necessary book, News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media (Verso, 2011).

What do Torres and Gonzales find out? The history of alternative presses – run by Indigenous peoples, Blacks, Latinos, and Asians – has all but vanished, even from the halls of journalism schools. The dig up this amazing history how the vile racism of Manifest Destiny and Empire building, and the supremacist beliefs of lawmakers, thinkers, clergy, and, of course, the editors of the white press did not always go unchallenged in a White-dominated society.

The stories are haunting, and our American history is replete with editors calling for the lynching of abolitionists, the burning and wrecking of alternative presses, and much of the motivation was embedded hatred toward Indigenous peoples, Latinos, and Blacks.

However, it’s clear early on in this book that the two Latino authors know history has repeated itself, constantly, when it comes to media and the Press: “Descriptions of ‘Sculking’ or ‘barbarous’ Indians were commonplace then, much as today’s news media use terms such as ‘wolf packs,’ ‘drug gangs,’ and ‘super-predators’ as monikers for non-white criminals…. Those early accounts thus establish a voluminous and entirely one-sided newspaper narrative: Native Americans were depicted as cunning, barbaric, and evil – and certainly undeserving of the vast lands coveted by the European settlers.”

There are so many magnificent stories in Torres and Gonzalez’ book, about brave editors trying to stop slavery through the pen and bully pulpit facing mobs, thugs, corrupt police and judges, and broken presidents.

This book is an essential read not only for journalists, students of media or those at the forefront of the Occupy Movement. This is our country’s history, scrubbed in many cases, of how people of color did fight the white color line with varying degrees of success.

It’s telling that many of the book’s jacket blurbs attest to News for All the People‘s groundbreaking resonance: “The historic inability of marginalized communities to control their own images has been devastating. News for All the People illustrates that this lack of control hasn’t been by accident. It’s a part of a greater story of media control and ownership that traces back to the creation of the United States. An essential read,” writes James Rucker, founder of ColorOfChange.org.

If it’s not already obvious to Real Change News readers, the point today is how those stories of the marginalized get into print or film or on TV or over the radio or Internet? Who controls the media? Books like People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn, or anything written by Studs Terkel, or the work of Barbara Ehrenreich, in Nickle and Dimed, or the huge trilogy, Memory of Fire by Eduardo Galeano, that covers the entire history of the Americas, give voice to people of color, poor people, labor activists, civil society, slaves and those that revolted against tyranny of many types.

Unfortunately, we live in an age where media may have monopolistic might through the few corporations controlling what most Americans watch or hear to get their news:

• Disney (market value: $72.8 billion)
• AOL-Time Warner (market value: $90.7 billion)
• Viacom (market value: $53.9 billion)
• General Electric (owner of NBC, market value: $390.6 billion)
• News Corporation (market value: $56.7 billion)
• Yahoo! (market value: $40.1 billion)
• Microsoft (market value: $306.8 billion)
• Google (market value: $154.6 billion)

Gonzales and Torres go four centuries back to the present, making a clear case on how these marginalized people of color literally fought to get the funds and show the mettle to publish their papers. There were amongst them contradictions, to be sure. Many Indigenous editors held slaves. Some of the white Hispanic editors were proponents of “Indian Removal.” Some elegant cases, though, are part of that story Torres and Gonzalez give us. People like escaped slave Frederick Douglass not only employed black male writers at his newspapers, he was a feminist who employed dozens of female writers.

The authors give us the case of the Cherokee, John Rollin Ridge, a writer and novelist, who wrote a novel about Joaquín Murieta, the California so-called bandit, but who moved to California and founded the Sacramento Bee. Here is that paper’s first editor and publisher, an Indigenous person, who has virtually disappeared from history. He sold the paper to James McClatchy, one of his employees. McClatchy developed the Sacramento Bee into the flagship newspaper of the McClatchy newspaper chain.

Now this is what’s so superb about Torres and Gonzalez’ work – they find on the McClatchy website, their official history, no mention that a Cherokee was the founder of their flagship paper. “They make it seem like James McClatchy actually started the Bee. But it’s this kind of expunging of the actual history of African Americans and Latinos and Native Americans in the development of the American press that is what really—another major theme of our book is to resurrect that history and have a more inclusive history of how our press developed, that there were all kinds of folks who have played pivotal roles, and actually heroic roles, in the development of a free press in America that have been expunged from the official histories,” Gonzales said recently in an interview on Democracy Now.

Gonzalez co-founded Democracy Now in 1996; currently, this daily news show – The War and Peace Report – is on more than 950 TV and radio stations. Here’s Democracy Now‘s vision statement: “For true democracy to work, people need easy access to independent, diverse sources of news and information.” This ties into the under girder of the Torres/Gonzalez book.

As one of Democracy Now‘s founders, Gonzalez has codified his own 30 years working in corporate media and 15 years with Democracy Now into this seven-year book project with Torres, a journalist, a former National Association of Hispanic Journalists deputy director, and adviser for the media reform organization, Free Press.

To reiterate: News for All the People is a tribute to the powerful independence of Black, Indigenous, Latino, and Asian people in attempting to bring to their communities news and perspectives counter to the white supremacist, expansionist, and war-mongering system that stole hundreds of millions of acres of land from Indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and Tejanos. It is a criticism of supremacist editors who aided and abetted the lynchings and murders of not only Blacks, but Mexicans and Asians, and not just in some backwater on the Delta, but in the center of Los Angeles.

Gonzalez synthesizes why this project was galvanized in the first place during an interview on his own show, Democracy Now, speaking with Amy Goodman: “I never was able to clearly understand why our media system is the way it is. The American people love to hate the media, in terms of their constant frustration with how newspapers and television and radio don’t provide accurate coverage. But it’s especially true among people of color. African Americans and Latinos and Native Americans and Asians have always felt denigrated and somehow misrepresented, deeply, by the American media system.”

What is it to be an American? That question has been wrested away from all the “other” races and ethnicities and from those of the female gender, as well as all the people deemed “The Other,” who are not part of the white race, or part of the one percent, or part of the monied elite with the ears of judges, politicians and CEOs glued to their every word.

In many ways, this book, also traces with aplomb the history of newspapers in this country, vaunting the lives, struggles and voices of publishers and editors who stuck their necks out. Key to this book’s foundation and keen story telling is a deep look at the evolution of newspapers and the press in this country’s history before, during and after the country’s founding.

The very first newspaper on this continent was Publick Occurrences, founded in 1690 in Boston. This was a three-page sheet, the first newspaper, which was was suppressed by the Massachusetts Council after one issue, “because it had some provocative articles in it,” Gonzales said.

“And all of the articles were about the threats of Native Americans, except there was one positive article. And that was about how some Christianized Indians in Plymouth were giving thanks to God on Thanksgiving. But generally—and so, Publick Occurrences set the prototype for how race would be covered in America, because every newspaper subsequent to that, throughout the colonial period, a huge portion of the content of newspapers was for the settlers to know what the Indians were up to.”

This book is replete with the stories that have not just been printed on the back pages of history books, but in some cases disregarded – scrubbed – completely. Those people of color running and writing for the Press were in many cases also anti-war and anti-imperialist. Frederick Douglass was the editor of several African-American newspapers throughout his lifetime and the most vocal opponent of the U.S. war against Mexico (1846-48).

In his papers, Douglass was railing against this war on Mexico. Here’s a quote from one of his articles that appeared 18 months into the Mexican-American War: “We have seen for eighteen months, the work of mutilation, crime and death go on, each advancing step sunk deeper in human gore. By every mail has come some new deed of violence. Cities have been attacked, and the cry of helpless women and children has risen, amid the shrieks and agony of death and dishonor. The living have gone forth, and dead corpses encased in lead have returned. Thousands of widows and orphans have sent up to the heavens their pitiful wail… And yet all is quiet as under the most perfect despotism. There is no united appeal, which would make the rulers tremble; no thronging voices of petition, no indignant rebuke, no prayer, ‘Lord, how long?’”

Finally, News for All the People takes us into the modern era of Latinos, Asian, Indigenous peoples, and Blacks fighting for their own voices in media. They get into the debates about how free and open the Internet will stay, if it ever was free/open in the first place. Both authors are clear about the need for an alternative press and more debate and discussion of the news for and by the corporate war state.

“One of the things that we’ve uncovered is that this fundamental debate that is constantly occurring is: does our nation need a centralized system of news and information, or does it need a decentralized, autonomous system? And which serves democracy best?” González said. “It turns out that in those periods of time when the government has opted for a decentralized or autonomous system, democracy has had a better opportunity to flourish, racial minorities have been able to be heard more often and to establish their own press. In those periods of the nation’s history when policies have fostered centralized news and information, that’s when dissident voices, racial minorities, marginalized groups in society are excluded from the media system.”

This book will help contextualize how bastardized, propagandized and mean media outlets like Fox News or Clear Channel have become, how the limited number of publishers controlling a majority of printed materials is bad for democracy, and what gave rise to those pugnacious independent writers and alternative periodicals fighting to expose the government-corporate role in stifling debate.

In These Times, the Texas Observer, Mother Jones, ProPublica, The Nation, Truthout, Yes Magazine, Orion Magazine and Democracy Now, Dissident Voice, Counterpunch, Truthdig, et al. give us some hope that an alternative press – hence mainstream – will gain favor over the profit-driven drivel and war-promoting yammering going on in the white media.

With A Renegade History of the United States, Thaddeus Russell casts a whole new light on the rejection by America’s lower classes of puritanical middle class notions of responsibility, discipline and self-denial. I think it’s a great pity the book hasn’t received more attention in the progressive and so-called “alternative media. In my view, it’s even more important than Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, because of its examination of social influences that cause the “disadvantaged” to reject middle class rules and convention. I think it’s an absolute must read for all progressive activists who are serious about organizing in and with blue collar and minority communities.

Russell offers a unique perspective on the mechanism by which Americans expanded their personal freedoms after the American Revolution. Unlike Zinn’s People’s History and similar “working class” histories, Russell argues that most of the person freedoms we enjoy originated, not from political movements, but from the refusal of renegades, degenerates and discontents to accept the puritanical work ethic the founding fathers tried to foist on them. In other words, we should thank America’s drunkards, prostitutes, pirates, slackers, “shiftless” slaves and juvenile delinquents for the unprecedented levels of personal freedom Americans enjoy.

I was really surprised by many parts of Russell’s book, especially where he describes the uptight, repressed social conservatives (including Martin Luther King) who led American campaigns for abolition, women’s suffrage, labor rights and civil rights. Despite their high profile campaigns for specific legal “rights,” the leaders of these movements worked nearly as hard trying to correct the “inappropriate” behavior of the masses they claimed to represent.

Our Socially Conservative Founding Fathers

Russell sets the stage by reminding us that the Puritans first left England due to the profound corruption in their homeland, as evidenced by liquor consumption, public holidays, communal feasts, sporting events and public festivals such as May Day. Most of the New World colonies they established glorified the ideal of hard work and strict frugality and scorned all forms of pleasure, including music, dancing, “luxuries” and colorful apparel. The founding fathers who laid out the workings of our republican form of government were all steeped in these influences. The writings of John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, John Madison, Benjamin Franklin universally condemn the lower classes for their corrupt, vicious, vile and depraved behavior. As Russell reveals, they are referring to behavior many of us would consider personal freedoms, such as drinking, dancing, non marital sex (especially between different races), prostitution and homosexuality (both were legal in the 18th century).

The major concern, in most cases, was that this behavior interfered with their ability to attend work. Russell’s description of early industrialism is quite fascinating, as factory workers, not their bosses, decided when they would show up for work and when they would go home.

The Internal Restraint of Citizenship

One of the primary aims of the founding fathers, according to Russell, was to stem this libertine way of life by establishing a system of government that replaced the external controls of the monarchy with the internal restraint of citizenship. They were all part of a transatlantic movement, heavily influenced by British philosopher John Locke, which believed that “self rule” was the most effective method of instilling self-discipline. This comes out most clearly in Russell’s description of the Freedman’s Bureau schools the federal government established in the South following the Civil War. The purpose of the schools was to persuade ex-slaves that freedom meant renouncing pleasures such as music, dancing and unrestrained sexuality.

Prostitutes and Ex-Slaves Challenge the Puritan Work Ethic

The unquestioned heroes of A Renegade History of the United States are prostitutes and ex-slaves. In the 19th century any woman who owned property, had sex outside of marriage, performed or received oral sex, used birth control, wore make-up, perfume or stylish clothes could only be a prostitute. It was prostitutes who won these and other rights modern American women take for granted. When women were barred from most jobs and wives had no legal right to own property, prostitutes, especially in the Wild West, became so wealthy that they funded crucial irrigation and road building projects. Likewise when most states banned birth control in the early 1800s, prostitutes continued to provide a market for contraceptives that stimulated production and distribution.

The importance of slaves and their descendents in the expansion of personal freedom relates to the tenacious manner in which they preserved a culture characterized by sensuous music, rhythms and dancing in a culture that condemned these activities as depraved and harmful to the work ethic.

The Unique Culture of Slavery

Russell presents a very different view of slavery that than is commonly depicted in public schools and the mainstream media. Sociologists have long recognized that the institution of slavery is incompatible with high quality work. Russell cites letters and diaries from 19th century slave masters expressing frustration about their slaves being “shiftless” and skillful in avoiding work. Plantation owners complained that harsh punishments, such as beatings, made slaves even more recalcitrant. George Washington (a prominent slave owner) wrote about the problem in a farming instruction manual he authored: “When an overlooker’s back is turned, the most of them will slight their work, or be idle altogether, in which case correction cannot retrieve either but often produces evils that are worse than the disease.”

Most landowners seemed resigned to providing other inducements to work, such as allowing slaves free time for drinking, gambling, dancing and sexual adventures. Slave women weren’t bound by laws against fornication, adultery and promiscuity that white women were forced to live by. This meant they weren’t expected to be virgins at the time of marriage, nor were they scorned for engaging in extramarital sex.

Teaching Ex-Slaves to Practice Self-Denial

Following the Civil War, there was a strong expectation that slaves would renounce these pleasurable pastimes and embrace the work ethic as good American citizens. Many eagerly embraced the discipline and self-denial emancipation demanded of them. Many didn’t. Many relished the “freedom” from responsibility they enjoyed when a slave master looked after all their basic needs.

In 1865 Congress confronted this dilemma by creating the Freedman’s Bureau to train ex-slaves how to become “good citizens.” Most enrolled eagerly, thinking they would be taught to read and write. Instead the classes focused on the ideals the founding fathers had promoted – frugality, self-denial and most importantly a love of work, even poorly paid work, as a source of virtue. Russell cites letters and interviews with ex-slaves who saw no point in being free if it meant they had to work harder than a slave did. Many northerners, who acquired southern plantations cheaply during Reconstruction, complained that ex-slaves made terrible workers. Not only did they come and go as they pleased, but they demanded days off and refused to work in inclement weather. Many ex-slaves also resisted pressure to adopt legal norms of marriage.

By 1872, the Republican-controlled Congress became so frustrated by their inability to teach ex-slaves to practice self-denial and commit themselves to hard work, monogamy and discipline that they abolished the Freedman’s Bureau.

King’s Campaign Against Un-Christian and Un-American Blacks

For me, the most interesting section of A Renegade History of the United States is the chapter about Martin Luther King and his little known campaign to persuade so-called “bad niggers” to embrace the strict work ethic and cult of responsibility and sexless self-sacrifice that characterized the predominant culture. In 1957 Reverend King launched three projects simultaneously: the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), to coordinate a nonviolent campaign to desegregate buses across the South, the Campaign for Citizenship to campaign for voting rights and a church-based campaign to rid African Americans of what King referred to as “un-Christian” and “un-American” habits. In 1957 he delivered a series of sermons condemning black people who led “tragic lives of pleasure and riotous living” (Problems of Personality Integration). In 1958 he wrote articles in Ebony and published his first book, Stride Towards Freedom, in which he claimed black poverty was as much due to laziness and lack of discipline and morality, as institutional racism. He also condemned rock and roll.

The Role of Violence vs Nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement

Russell also weighs in on what has become a hot issue in the Occupy movement’s “diversity of tactics” debate. He lays out compelling evidence that 1) only a tiny minority of southern blacks participated in King’s nonviolent movement and 2) it was “bad niggers” and violence, rather than King’s nonviolent campaign, that won the first major civil rights victories in 1963. According to Russell’s careful review of Birmingham police records, the years between 1958 and 1963 saw a dramatic escalation of incidents in which black residents of both sexes punched, kicked, bit, stabbed and shot white residents who infringed on their freedoms, even in minor ways. He describes a number of these incidents in the book.

He also points out that the most famous image of the civil rights movement – of Bull Connor spraying protestors with a fire hose – culminated a week of rioting during the first week of May 1963. These weren’t nonviolent protestors being hosed but black rioters who, over a week, injured nearly a dozen cops with rocks and bottles and who were starting to arm themselves with knives and guns. The official history books quibble over the identity of the black people Bull Connor attacked with fire hoses, describing them as “bystanders,” “onlookers,” “spectators,” or “people along the fringes.” Yet police records make it really clear that Connor was dealing with a full blown race riot his officers were unable to quell.

Why the Chamber of Commerce Negotiated with King

According to Russell, this record of increasing black violence in Birmingham and other southern cities casts King’s famous “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” in a totally new light. In it he gives the Birmingham city fathers a clear choice: they can negotiate with him or face growing civil unrest. Russell also quotes a fascinating Wall Street Journal interview with Sidney Smyer, the president of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce. Smyer brokered the deal with King and the SCLC. The Chamber of Commerce president talks of the desperation of the Montgomery business community to end the racial violence, owing to its extremely negative economic impact

“The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society;” says the Smith-Cuckson translation of the tenth thesis, “the standpoint of the new is human society or social humanity.”  In plain English we recognize the warning already sounded in 1845 that normalized uses of “civil society” bring with them bureaucratic retinues, orders of articulation, credentials, and border-sweeping technologies of lethal effect.

In the author’s German original, the term for the old society is not “civil” but “burgerliche,” which is usually translated into “English” as bourgeoise.  Therefore on this May Day 2012 we ask how far from a bourgeoise society have we traveled and what are the prospects of ever realizing our “social humanity” (oder die gesellschaftliche Menschheit)?

This May Day question is born from the robust and passionate vision expressed by the twenty-something German author when he dashed off the tenth thesis as a prelude to his life’s work.  It reminds me of a slightly older Thoreau, who wrote in his great “Civil Disobedience” of 1849 that “when men (sic) are prepared for it” they will be governed by no government at all.  Together these authors sing lyrical sentiments worthy of May Day, a calendar occasion for marking human celebrations of life, labor, and liberty.

As Rosa Luxembourg tells the modern history of May Day, it was born in Australia by workers — the stonemasons of Melbourne University, says Wikipedia — who in 1856 won their struggle for an 8-hour work-day.  In the radical Republican aftermath of the US Civil War, the 8-hour day was adopted for federal employees and proclaimed as a presidential principle by Ulysses S. Grant.  Deploying the 8-hour policy into “private” employment became a bloody struggle for several decades more, validating the sorts of things that Marx liked to write about revolution, and solidifying the modern association between May Day and labor struggle.

And still, the story of May Day goes back into archaic traditions of human responses to springtime.  Dancing around maypoles, people enact a sense of participation in the joys of natural renewal and growth won back from winter’s death.  Even in the “Official Eight Hour Song,” we hear a human demand to experience the things of spring.  “We want to feel the sunshine, and we want to smell the flowers, for surely God has willed it and we mean to have it ours.”  In the accumulated history of factory work, the cruelty of long hours would become ever more unbearable in proportion to April’s lengthening light.

“Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” asked Emerson, anonymously, in his essay “Nature” of 1836. “Our hands and hearts are weary and our homes are heavy with dole,” rejoined the singers of the 8-hour song, “if our lives are filled with drudgery, what need of a human soul?”  In some parts of Texas especially this year spring has gushed from the soil like a trillion geysers of greening promises.  Landscapes that last year groaned under dehydrations the color of burnt toast this year have sprung into unbelievable thickness of life.  Just add water, and up from underground it comes dressed for dancing in the sun.

“All social life is practical,” declares thesis number eight, as our countdown continues.  “All mysteries which lead theory to mysticism find their rational solution in human practice and in the comprehension of this practice.”  May Day 2012 promises to revive the greening energies of general strike, when people declare for themselves a day to stand apart from everything they do in the name of “civil society” and posit the experience of a more social humanity.

The global occupy movement inspired by Tahrir Square is this spring beginning to make-over vacant lots and abandoned bookstores into gardens and museums.  People are seeking new ways to practice their social humanity.  Dead spaces, dehydrated by a “capital strike” are being renewed through social labor, which is the only source that capital can come from in the first place.  People are exploring human practices and comprehending possibilities in the best ways they know how.

“There is no doubt,” wrote the wise Jane Addams, “that the great difficulty we experience in reducing to action our imperfect code of social ethics arises from the fact that we have not yet learned to act together, and find it far from easy even to fuse our principles and aims into a satisfactory statement.”  There is no royal road to the new, but that has never stopped life from moving forward.  We don’t have to live out other people’s gridlock as our own.

So when I hear that San Francisco activists have ploughed under idle land the better to grow their own food, or that people in East Lansing have transformed an abandoned book store into a museum, I think of Henry George scanning his beloved bay area and recognizing the absurd contradiction of a system that would enforce monopoly over idle property even as it grinds out longer lines of joblessness and poverty.  Throw property open to anyone weary of idle hands, and you practically eliminate idleness altogether.  “It is not the relations of capital and labor,” said George, “not the pressure of population against subsistence, that explains the unequal development of society.”  No.  “The great cause of inequality in the distribution of wealth is inequality in the ownership of land.”

We don’t know if Henry George was right.  In the end it will be a practical question answered in practice, not theory alone.  But we do have some acquaintance with the practical absurdity of “civil society” reacting with brutality to the social, human occupations of idle spaces.  Pardon us, please, if we are well reminded of Hawthorne’s immortal account of what happened to Thomas Morton.  A general strike would at least emphasize an insight that unifies both ancient and modern histories of May Day.  It is through our sheer participation in life itself that we find any shred of value whatsoever.  By dedicating a day each year to the dancing practices of our social humanity and their comprehensions, we remind ourselves of a proper standard for evaluating everything in between.

In 1900, there were no Ashkenazi Jews living in Palestine; essentially none, that is, but a few, small mostly temporary Russian Jewish settlers, not totally unusual for various cults in the Holy Land at that time. Theodore Herzl, frequently designated ‘The Father of Modern Zionism’, because of the publication of his book, The Jewish State, in 1896, and because of the founding of the World Zionist Congress a year later,  stated in 1897:

[We shall] spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment. Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.

Thus the concept of ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians was introduced.

By the 1930s, the ‘transfer’ of Arabs was the unanimous opinion of the founders of Israel. So-called transfer committees, headed by Joseph Weitz, Director of Land Management for the Jewish Agency, were set up explicitly for the purpose of studying ways of transferring Arabs out of Palestine.

At the beginning of 1948, despite 50 years of land purchases, Jews only owned 6% of the land of Palestine. By the year’s end, the Israeli army controlled 78% of Palestine in a process of ethnic cleansing that saw the destruction of 531 Arab cities or villages and 11 Arab urban areas, with massacres at almost all of those towns or villages, the almost complete looting of Palestinian property and wealth, including looting of banks, confiscation of Palestinian homes and property, businesses, fields and orchards.

The Palestinian people lost everything. Those who survived the massacres lost their careers, their means of livelihood, only to find refuge in tent cities set up by the United Nations which were later to become squalid refugee camps of cinder block buildings dotted around the Middle East.

By just checking the time line, one quickly disposes of the 60 year old Israeli propaganda myth that the state of Israel was innocently minding its own business when it was attacked by five armies of surrounding Arab states.

The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians began on November 30, 1947 in Haifa when the Jewish army under David Ben Gurion, along with the Jewish terrorist group, the Irgun, under Manachem Begin, began shelling the Arab sections of that city. In March of 1948, David Ben Gurion finalized and distributed Plan D to his officers, which was a program for destroying and depopulating Arab villages and eliminating any resistance. The massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin, only one of many, but possibly the most famous, occurred on April 9, 1948. Israel declared itself a state on May 14, 1948, and it was the next day, May 15, that the first regular soldier of an Arab army set foot in Palestine. By then, about half of the 800,000 Palestinian refugees had been generated and all of Palestine’s urban centers and been depopulated of Arabs.

One cannot understand the natural anger and resentment of the Arab people, and particularly the Palestinian people, toward Israel, and also to the West, for supporting their oppressors and for being blind to their own suffering, without coming to a full understanding of the catastrophe, which they call the Nakbah, that befell the Palestinian people in 1948.

Nor can one understand the futility of the exalted ‘peace process’, ongoing now for the last 22 years, concurrent with the further erosion of Palestinian rights and freedom, and migration of new Jewish settlers into the West Bank and East Jerusalem, without understanding that Israel acquired its present status as a state, not by negotiation with Palestinians, but by brute force and very much against the will of the indigenous people.

For the Arab people, Israel is an alien implant, imposed by western powers, in the heart of the Arab world against the will of the Arab people.

The Palestinians living under occupation have been living in that situation for 40 years, deprived of natural human rights, abused and, more often than not, humiliated, suffering degradation and humiliation on a daily basis, as their land and property and resources are daily confiscated by the state of Israel, who also winks at settler violence and looks the other way as settlers, who have built their settlement so hilltops, dump their sewage onto Palestinian farmland, as they also cut down their olive trees, burn their fields and poison or otherwise kill their livestock, in order to make way for more settlers and settlements as well as to make life as miserable as possible for the Palestinians.

Zionism is a political program of clearing Palestine of Palestinian Arabs in order to create the space for an exclusive Jewish state. As such, its goal is to destroy the Palestinians as a people with an identity as a people and with an attachment to the land of their births and the births of their ancestry. Such a project meets the definition of genocide in international law. Genocide is a crime against humanity as well as against its immediate victims. Genocide is a crime in which all of humanity is degraded.

Shotwell’s writing is humorous, acerbic and to the point. As part of a democratic movement in the UAW, he was one of many that fought hard to prevent the tidal wave of layoffs, plant closings and destruction of benefits the union leadership not only allowed but seemed to encourage. The missives published in this book are the textual equivalent to the Industrial Workers of the World’s (IWW) Mr. Block cartoons. For those who aren’t aware of Mr. Block, let me quote IWW agitator Walker C. Smith:

Mr. Block is legion. He is representative of that host of slaves who think in terms of their masters. Mr. Block owns nothing, yet he speaks from the standpoint of the millionaire; he is patriotic without patrimony; he is a law-abiding outlaw… [who] licks the hand that smites him and kisses the boot that kicks him… the personification of all that a worker should not be.

In other words, Mr. Block was a satirical character created to call attention to workers and union bosses who identified with the owners and management at the expense of their fellow workers.

Autoworkers Under the Gun makes it very clear how the auto industry’s exorbitant payments to its executives and management, combined with a penchant for bankruptcy, destroyed it. Calling globalization a “four bit word for sweatshop,” Shotwell points out how CEOs and their co-conspirators control the discussion about the economy by blaming the workers for wanting to earn a living and pension. As most readers know, the other part of this scenario involves those executives purposely downsizing the corporation by moving jobs offshore. His biting commentary reminds the reader how intentional this entire process is.

Unlike most mainstream reporting on the demise of the auto industry, Shotwell gives the reader the view from the shop floor. It’s not just the harassment from management he describes, he also tells stories about workers using their power to fight back. After one particular attack on management’s machinations to undermine the workers and their union that drew a strong reaction from the bosses, Shotwell arrived for his shift to find his machine taken apart in a show of solidarity. Without that machine, the line was shut down for the entire shift.

Questioning the value of strikes that are not industry wide because of the International’s cowardice or because of the law, Shotwell urges workers to consider alternatives like occupations and working to rule. The point of the former is to prevent management from closing factories. After all, they can’t close a building if people are inside it. Working to rule, meanwhile, has multiple effects. It slows down the speedups imposed by management to increase production while also preventing shop closures. In addition, working to rule can create overtime or, even better, the necessity to hire more people. The underlying point of both tactics is to emphasize that it is the workers who run the factory, not the CEOs and their minions.

It was more than a year ago that thousands of Wisconsin workers and supporters occupied the Capitol building in the city of Madison. The reason for the occupation was to try and prevent the anti-worker governor and legislature from passing legislation that would end collective bargaining for all state employees except firefighters and state police, end dues check-off from paychecks, and force unions to re-certify every year. Under the guise of solving a budget crisis (that was created by giving mammoth tax breaks to corporations and the wealthy in Wisconsin), this bill was forced through the legislature despite the protests. Nonetheless, the protests were a welcome reaction to the never-ending attacks on working people in the United States.

Naturally, a few books have been published about this event, now known as the Wisconsin Uprising. Of those texts that wrote favorably, most have done a fairly decent job of describing the flow of the protests, the workers culture that was celebrated, and the intense feeling of solidarity felt by the participants. Not all have done as good of a job analyzing why the protests failed and what they mean for the future of workers’ movements in the United States.

There is one entry; however, that does broach both of these subjects with some depth. Titled Wisconsin Uprising, this book, edited by labor writer Michael Yates, provides a genuinely left analysis. The collection of essays is divided into two main sections, one discussing the protests, their background and their organization. The other discusses the future of workplace organizing in the wake of the legislation’s success and the concomitant attacks on working people around the world.

The first section takes its subject and looks at the international aspects of the protest (austerity protests in Greece, Britain, etc.), its roots in capitalist crisis, and the lack of resistance experience among protesters. It was this latter element that gave the protesters false hope regarding the role police play, as well as the role unions play. Indeed, much like the points made in Shotwell’s text, union leadership often concedes benefits, conditions and wages just to keep union dues structure intact and their paychecks coming in. This strategy eventually backfires because it weakens the unions in the eyes of the workers. Seeing this, corporations and governments attack unions, hoping to further weaken their standing in the eyes of members. Once the union has been defanged, as occurred in Wisconsin after the aforementioned legislation was rammed through in the middle of the night, the rank and file often stops paying dues out of fear or after drawing the conclusion that the union has no power.

The solution to this is simple. Like Shotwell emphasizes in his book, the best response to the attacks on workers and their unions is simple: more actions, more solidarity and less complacency. The most positive conclusion to be drawn from the Wisconsin uprising is that there is an understanding in the United States that workers not only are being screwed, but that they will fight back. The narrative here echoes the hope found in other books about the uprising in Wisconsin and the occupy movement that followed. However, it tempers that hope with an understanding of what labor is up against in this latest battle with capital. It is an understanding that comes from the years of experience between the collection of contributors and their leftist comprehension of how monopoly capitalism works.

Shotwell explains why Wisconsin happened in a piece discussing concessions when he writes:

The nation that kicked off the struggle for the eight hour day is logging more hours than any modern .industrialized nation on earth. Every household needs two wage slaves and every wage slave needs a vehicle to keep them on the treadmill. The turmoil is designed to foil collective action. The degradation of workers is not natural, accidental or unavoidable. It is a plan. Put the jigsaw pieces together and the picture is clear as glass and sharp as pain.

The complementary reason to Shotwell’s concise explanation of neoliberal capital’s plan for the world is that workers ignored the writing on the wall as long as it happened to someone else, while those that were unionized saw themselves as clients of the union when they needed to be fighters in solidarity with those that were the “someone else.” Check out these books for their analysis, their insight and their rabble rousing. Then go do some rabble-rousing of your own.

Greece is Ground Zero of the austerity onslaught, a massive, global re-engineering of capitalist societies designed to roll back workers’ gains of the past century into a neo-feudal state of debt peonage. In Greece, public sector wages have been cut by 20 to 30 per cent, while tens of thousands of civil servants have been put on partial pay. Pensions have been cut by 20 to 40 per cent. Health and education spending have been slashed as well.

Last week, a 77-year-old retired pharmacist, Dimitris Christoulas, in despair over what international bankers have done to his country, shot himself in the head in front the Greek parliament. Many Greeks believe his death was not a suicide but a murder by capitalism. His death prompted mass mourning and protest.

Austerity is not only killing the future, it is also killing the past. A new law passed as part of the austerity measures requires the Greek Ministry of Culture to cut 30 to 50 per cent of its personnel.

Today 66 administrative departments of antiquities throughout the country handle the workload and law enforcement pertaining to Greece’s cultural heritage, including permits for use of land where archaeological treasures are thought to be buried, the organisation and running of archaeological sites and museums, excavations and archaeological surveys, and archaeological scientific research.

The Ministry of Culture and Tourism is comprised of 7000 employees, including 950 archaeologists, civil servants, and 2000 guards and night-guards. Moreover, each year 3500 extra employees are hired on short term contracts. In November 2011, 10 percent of the total workforce of the Ministry of Culture that represented the most experienced employees (with more than 33 years of experience) was forced to leave the service and retire, as part of plans to reduce the total number of public sector employees in Greece.

In recent months, there have been burglaries at National and Municipal Galleries, and an armed robbery at the Museum of Olympia, the site of the first Olympic Games.

Despina Koutsouba, president of the Association of Greek Archaeologists (SEA), says treasure dating back to the Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine periods has disappeared from the museum, including “a golden ring stamp, copper sculptures from the eighth century BC, coins and clay vases.”

In Italy, a similar fate is befalling ancient artifacts because of austerity cuts. According to an April 9 report,

Fragments of the 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheatre — now at the centre of a busy road junction and blackened with pollution — have begun falling down and the restoration project’s start date of March is looking increasingly unlikely.

Meanwhile, at the archaeological site of Pompeii near Naples, which has also been hit by a series of alarming collapses in recent months, the long-mooted prospect of bringing in private investors is still a distant prospect.

Italy, like Greece, is now turning to privitization schemes to keep its cultural heritage sites standing. Greece has offered the Acropolis to “advertising firms, movie companies and other ventures.” And even though Italy, the fourth biggest tourism destination in the world, devotes only 0.21 per cent of its Gross Domestic Product to culture, austerity measures have seen cuts of 17 million euros to the La Scala opera house and Piccolo Teatro in Milan.

The latest victim of capitalist austerity, the ancient past in Italy and Greece, echoes the destruction of ancient cultural sites and artifacts in Afghanistan and Iraq following US-led invasions.

Following the entry of US forces into Baghdad in April 2003, a wave of looting broke out that targeted the country’s cultural institutions, with the National Museum of Iraq, which holds one of the world’s most important collections of Mesopotamian antiquities, being looted, the National Library and Archives burned and other institutions up and down the country, including museums, archaeological sites, schools and universities looted or destroyed.

In an interview that appeared in this newspaper at the time, Mounir Bouchenaki, then assistant director-general for culture at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, in Paris, spoke of his shock at crunching through the 20cm of ash covering the floors of the burned-out Iraqi National Library on a fact-finding mission to Baghdad.

An estimated 400,000 to 600,000 artifacts were looted from Iraqi archeological sites between 2003 and 2005, and at least 25 per cent of the Iraqi National Library’s holdings were destroyed in the fires of April 2003.

Some 60 percent of the country’s Ottoman and Hashemite archives were destroyed. While some 600-700 Islamic manuscripts were apparently destroyed in the fires that destroyed the library of the Ministry of Awqaf on 13-14 April 2003, a further 5,250 had been moved off site, though their whereabouts is unknown. The Ministry’s collection of 45,000 printed books, including rare Ottoman Turkish works, was destroyed.

The imperialist wars for oil and other resources, as well as strategic military positioning in the region, wiped out artifacts and sites of cultures that were over 5,000 years old, in the so-called “cradle of civilization.” Now the ancient cultures of Italy and Greece are facing the same capitalist pillaging.

The Italian Autonomist Franco Berardi once said, “The future now seems imaginable only as the intersection of catastrophic tendencies. Paradoxically, only from the interference between the various planes of catastrophe does it seem possible to imagine a salvation.” When the catastrophic history of the austerity agenda is finally written, one wonders what other histories will remain?

These were the days before Ipods or even boom boxes. Hell, 8-tracks had barely made an impression on our youthful culture back then. The only source of music that was portable was the transistor radio. In the Baltimore-Washington DC area, there were three or four stations that played the songs people were listening to. WPGC-FM and WCAO-AM played the Top 40 hits of the day while WOOK and WUST played soul and R&B. While radio was not as divided into niche markets then as it is today, the fact is that the very few performers were heard on both stations. For example, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles were never heard on the soul stations, while Bobby Blue Bland and Joe Tex were rarely heard on the Top 40 stations.

There was one man, however, who was heard quite often on both formats back then. His name was James Brown. We would choose our teams and play pickup game after pickup game. Since there were usually more than ten kids hanging around, the odd guys out chose the music (unless we were convinced otherwise). Whenever the current hit by Brown came on the brothers would start vamping. Doing the slide step as they neared a basket or attempting a split at mid court. Then they would tell us lighter skinned guys to not even try. We knew we couldn’t dance like Mr. Brown That particular period of time was when James Brown truly was the king of soul, when he really was The One.

This was also a period when racism had very few shadows to hide it. Black men were subject to whatever wrath a white man felt like imposing on him. Black men with money and power like James Brown felt that wrath perhaps less often but in greater measure when they did feel it. When he released his single “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud), Brown was making it clear: he didn’t really give a shit about racists keeping him from his music, money and people. Never much of a militant, James Brown was always proud, even as a street urchin cum hustler in Augusta, GA. A new biography of Brown, titled The One: The Life and Music of James Brown places that pride in the context of the black freedom struggle in the United States. It opens with the story of the 1739 Stono Rebellion in colonial Georgia that saw slaves killing slave owners and increasing their ranks as they marched through the area just south of Charleston, SC beating their drums, singing and dancing in rebellion. Forty slaves and twenty whites were killed during that rebellion and never again did Georgia legally import slaves from the African continent.

With the story of the slave rebellion as his jumping off point, biographer RJ Smith writes a tale that evokes Mr. Brown’s insistence on freedom, his pride, innate musicality, and the high-energy life that helped earn him the title of the hardest working man in show business. Smith gives the reader a fantastic story: from Brown’s roots in Augusta, where he entertained soldiers on weekend passes with his dancing while hustling them down to the brothel where he lived with his aunt, to his casket’s tour of three cities after Brown’s death in 2006. The text details the complexities of a man who, with his bandmates, created a signature musical style that many have used as inspiration but none have successfully imitated. It also traces the political journey of a black man in the United States during a time when the world of Black America underwent a sea change. Never a militant, but always an individual proud of his racial and personal identity, Brown’s politics included Martin Luther King and Richard Nixon; Elijah Muhammad and Strom Thurmond. His support for Nixon’s 1972 campaign led to a boycott attempt by several African-American organizations and individuals that had some success. Smith relates a tale of 10,000 seat arenas with less than 2,000 concertgoers. When I thought about seeing a concert of his in Frankfurt, Germany in 1972, my African-American comrades convinced me not to go because of Brown’s support of Nixon (it didn’t take much—I hated Nixon). They passed out leaflets in the parking lot discouraging attendance. At the same time, Brown’s singles were still being played on the radio and still selling.

At a recent anti-racism rally in Burlington, VT. held in the wake of the murder of Trayvor Martin, a black teen talked about his struggle to maintain a positive self-identity in a culture that insists on labeling he and other black males in as negative of a light as possible. I will paraphrase his statement here: I am going to be me.  Part of that is saying hi to my neighbors even if they won’t say hi to me. Part of that is dating who I want. Part of that is being black. I am going to be me. James Brown would have agreed with that young man. His political actions, his insistence on doing things his way musically and otherwise—all of these actions, writes Smith, stem from a combination of Brown’s ego, mistrust and determination.

To hear Smith tell it, James Brown definitely did not come from comfortable beginnings. He movingly describes just how tough it was. Anything that came easy made Brown suspicious. This didn’t seem to change as he grew older and developed into one of the world’s most well-known people—his fame in Africa rivaled that of boxer Muhammad Ali, while in the United States very few acts sold more records than Brown. Never one to rest on his laurels, Brown gave hundreds of shows every year, went through wives and mistresses almost as quickly as he did towns and cities when he was on tour, and spent money quicker than he could count it. The magic of Smith’s writing is that Brown’s life is told as captivatingly as it was lived. This is a classic rags-to-riches Horatio Alger story but with a twist: it’s Alger’s Ragged Dick as an African-American bootblack who rises above his station.

Smith, who is also the author of The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Last African American Renaissance, and a former music writer for the Village Voice and Spin magazine, has done a public service by writing this biography. His approach to the narrative does more than detail the life of James Brown. It captures the essence of a James Brown performance and manipulates that essence—its franticness, its passion and its sheer jubilation—into a story about one of the world’s greatest musicians and performers ever. In Smith’s telling, it becomes clear that James Brown’s myth was not only larger than life, so was James Brown himself.

As Israel, the United States and their NATO allies set their sights on the “prize,” Iran’s vast petrochemical wealth, multiple themes have been floated by corporate media to make the case for war.

Since the 1980s, nuclear proliferation, terrorism and now, according to the Treasury Department, Iran’s alleged links to global narcotrafficking networks have all been evoked as clarion calls for “regime change.” It would serve us well however, to explore the recent history of the secret state’s reliance upon the illicit trade and how such dalliances advance America’s wider geopolitical goals.

Contras and Kosovars: CIA Shadow Wars

In the 1980s, it was the Sandinistas and “Castro-Communism” who did nicely for the Reagan administration. As money and weapons flowed to “our boys,” the Contras, they repaid the favor by massacring Nicaraguans by the tens of thousands for Uncle Sam while generously providing cocaine by the ton, to party-happy Americans during that “go-go” decade.

Indeed, when Colombian drug lords Jorge Ochoa and Pablo Escobar began their profitable partnership, they did so alongside dope-dealing Bolivian fascists and Argentine neo-Nazi generals with long-standing ties to the CIA. As Consortium News revealed: “The putsch, which became known as the Cocaine Coup, installed [Luis] García Meza and other drug-connected military officers who promptly turned Bolivia into South America’s first modern narco-state. The secure supply of Bolivian cocaine was important to the development of the Medellín cartel in the early 1980s.”

In fact, it was Bolivian drug lord Roberto Suárez Goméz who financed the coup. With close ties to Pinochet’s regime in Chile and Argentina’s death squad generals, Suárez was a fixture amongst far-right international circles who generously distributed funds to South American affiliates of the Nazi-tainted World Anti-Communist League (WACL).

When WACL was founded in 1966 in Taipei as the Asian People’s Anti-Communist League (APACL), it first functioned as a wholly-owned subsidiary of the governments of Taiwan under dictator Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist narcocracy and the Republic of Korea, then under the iron rule of American ally, Park Chung Hee.

Amongst other notable members who founded WACL were Yoshio Kodama and Ryiochi Sasakawa, Class-A Japanese war criminals and fascists who were top leaders of post-war yakuza crime syndicates. Both men were billionaires who’s wealth derived from control over Asian drug, gambling and prostitution rackets. Imprisoned in 1945 for war crimes Sasakawa, along with Kodama and future Japanese Prime Minister Nobusuke Kishi, was saved from the gallows and released from prison in 1948, a result of his OSS-CIA connections. He once proudly stated: “I am the world’s richest fascist.” Both Kodama and Sasakawa operated alongside old “China hands” such as Paul Helliwell, who created CIA front companies linked to the drug traffic, Bangkok-based Sea Supply Corporation and the Taiwanese airline Civil Air Transport.

Indeed, it was none other than Sasakawa, the power behind the throne of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party, who provided major funding for Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s intelligence-connected Unification Church, and WACL, key actors in Bolivia’s Cocaine Coup, facts you’re not likely to read in the Moon-owned Washington Times.

As analyst Peter Dale Scott wrote for Variant magazine, “In the post-war years, when the drug-financed China Lobby was strong in Washington, and the U.S. shipped arms and Chinese Nationalist troops into eastern Burma, opium production in that remote region increased almost five-fold in fifteen years, from less than 80 to 300-400 tons a year. Production doubled again in the 1960s, the heyday of the Kuomintang-CIA alliance in Southeast Asia.” In his most recent book, Scott noted:

The members of Helliwell’s small OSS detachment in Kunming (Helliwell, [E. Howard] Hunt, Ray Cline, Lucien Conein, and Mitchell WerBell) cast a long shadow over both postwar intelligence-drug triarchies and the WACL’s history. In addition to Helliwell’s support for KMT drug traffickers in Burma and Hunt’s contribution in Mexico, APACL’s formation is said to have owed a large debt to Ray Cline. In the late 1970s John Singlaub, another veteran of Kunming, took over the WACL. Lucien Conein became a case officer of the Vietnamese officials overseeing anticommunist drug networks, first Ngo Dinh Nhu and later police chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan. Mitchell WerBell, who went on to develop small arms for intelligence services like the [Mexican] DFS, was also involved with WACL death squad patrons … and was eventually indicted himself on drug charges. (Peter Dale Scott, American War Machine, Lanham, Maryland, Rowman & Littlefield, 2010, pp. 52-53)

Shortly after WACL’s formation, the organization was joined by representatives of the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, an unsavory cabal of war criminals and Nazi collaborators led by Yaroslav Stetsko. When German armies invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stetsko, then the leader of the collaborationist Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists proclaimed the founding of a Ukrainian quisling state allied with the Third Reich. In the “Act of Proclamation of Ukrainian Statehood,” Stetsko declared that Ukraine “will closely cooperate with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world.” After the war, Stetsko and his cohorts fled Europe along the Vatican’s infamous “ratlines” and took up the anticommunist cudgel for the United States while working alongside European and Latin American fascists connected to global drug networks.

As the corrupt García Meza regime consolidated power, they butchered leftists, peasants and union organizers and were assisted by Argentine “dirty war” specialists, CIA asset and escaped Nazi war criminal, Klaus Barbie and a motley crew of far-right terrorists. It was a thoroughly international affair. Fresh from fomenting bloodshed in Italy, Stefano Delle Chiaie, the architect of the 1980 Bologna railway station bombing which killed 85, a hard core Nazi with operational links to both the CIA and NATO’s Gladio network, put his unique “skills” to use building up the global drug trade and exporting terror into Central America. As left-wing researcher Stuart Christie documented:

One of the Delle Chiaie organisers in Latin America, West German Joachim Fiebelkorn (born 1947), a Paladin and Kampfbund Deutscher Soldaten veteran, as well as a Frankfurt pimp, who had worked with Delle Chiaie in Bolivia, stated later to the West German police that Delle Chiaie was the number one international middleman between the Sicilian Mafia and the Latin American cocaine producers. Based in a police barracks next to the West German Embassy in the capital, La Paz, the Delle Chiaie men, Los Novios de la Muerte–’The Fiancés of Death’–as they called themselves, were contracted as security guards and enforcers for the multinational drug empire of Roberto Suárez, described as the ‘King of Coca,’ overseeing the production, transportation, distribution and marketing of cocaine. (Stuart Christie, Stefano Delle Chiaie: Portrait of a Black Terrorist, London, Anarchy Magazine/Refract Publications, 1984)

Investigative journalists Marta Gurvich and Robert Parry reported that “many of the Argentine intelligence officers who assisted in the Cocaine Coup followed up their victory in Bolivia by moving northward into Central America to train a ragtag force of Nicaraguan contras.” By “1981,” Gurvich and Parry wrote, “President Reagan formally authorized the CIA to collaborate with the Argentine intelligence services in building up the contra army.”

Under the stewardship of CIA Director William Casey, the Company did more than just watch from the sidelines. With a wink-and-a-nod from the Reagan White House, they concluded that the Medellín Cartel, as they had earlier with Asian drug mafias, could be used to help defeat communism in Latin America. Together with the far-larger Cali Cartel, run by the enterprising Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, they did just that. It was estimated at the time that the CIA’s underworld “friends” made up to $60 million per month; chump change by today’s standards, but with the Sandinistas out of power by 1990, relations with Pablo Escobar soured.

In fact, as the National Security Archive revealed in previously classified documents, when Escobar was run to ground “key evidence” linked “the U.S.-Colombia task force charged with tracking down [the] fugitive … to one of Colombia’s most notorious paramilitary chiefs.” According to the Archive, “The affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S. intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narcotraffickers every bit as dangerous as Escobar himself.” They had; a pattern that persists today as can readily be seen in the U.S. “war” against Mexico’s powerful Cartels.

As we now know, this great drug war “victory” in practice favored one corrupt Colombian faction over another with no discernible effects on the ground. Indeed, as Narco News reported, a leaked classified document written by Department of Justice attorney Thomas M. Kent “claims that federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Administration’s office in Bogotá, Colombia, are the corrupt players in the war on drugs.”

“Kent’s memorandum,” journalist Bill Conroy disclosed, “contains some of the most serious allegations ever raised against U.S. antinarcotics officers: that DEA agents on the front lines of the drug war in Colombia are on drug traffickers’ payrolls, complicit in the murders of informants who knew too much, and, most startlingly, directly involved in helping Colombia’s infamous rightwing paramilitary death squads to launder drug money.”

“The memo further claims that, rather than being simply a few ‘bad apples’ who need to be reported to their superiors, these allegedly dirty agents are being protected by an ongoing cover-up orchestrated by ‘watchdog’ agencies within the Justice Department,” Conroy wrote.

This was hardly an aberration but rather, emblematic of the corrupt nature of official U.S. policies going back decades. As we learned in the late 1990s, largely as a result of public outrage generated by the late Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance series, a secret Memorandum of Understanding between Reagan’s Justice Department and the Agency came to light. That 1982 memo legally freed the CIA from reporting drug smuggling and other crimes committed by their assets; a point to keep in mind when we explore U.S. allegations of corruption by top Iranian officials below.

Were these Cold War anomalies? Hardly.

When the “Great Triangulator” Bill Clinton took the helm in 1993, it was Slobodan Milošević who reprised the role of the century as Europe’s “new Hitler.” With the Cold War over, the Soviet “menace” a fleeting image in the rearview mirror, and with neoliberal economic “reforms” all the rage, America began its eastward expansion of NATO into the former Eastern Bloc. Yugoslavia, deemed an historical anachronism had to go, and so it did.

Never mind that before occupying the Oval Office, when he was governor of Arkansas Clinton deep-sixed investigations into illicit operations by legendary CIA drug pilot and DEA snitch Barry Seal. Indeed, Seal and his cohorts, as well-documented, flew vast quantities of drugs into Mena Airport for the Medellín Cartel in “protected” drug operations that helped fund the Nicaraguan Contras, as investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker reported for The Washington Weekly back in 1997.

Recapitulating a modus operandi which the secret state has relied upon since the end of World War Two, first in Asia and then globally, far-right political and religious extremists and drug trafficking organizations with ties to Western intelligence began working their magic in the Balkans.

Across the Atlantic, while the media obsessed over stains on Monica Lewinsky’s infamous blue dress, the dismemberment of Yugoslavia was in full-swing. America and Germany’s close allies, the secessionist Bosnian government under Alija Izetbegović, a darling of Western “humanitarian interventionists,” an Islamist fraudster who had expressed sympathies for the 13th Waffen SS Handschar Division during the war, which earned him a stint in a Yugoslav prison, provided thousands of veteran Afghan-Arab fighters passports and guns to help “liberate” Bosnia. As with NATO’s current “regime change” ops in Libya and Syria, Salafist jihadis aligned with a CIA shadow army which morphed into Al Qaeda, the “database,” poured into the region.

While Osama Bin Laden’s minions wrecked havoc in Bosnia, merrily butchering Jews, Roma and Serbs whilst establishing Saudi-financed Wahhabist “charities,” later in the decade they gained entrée into Kosovo where they joined NATO’s newest “best friends forever,” the Kosovo Liberation Army. Ruled with iron fists by gangsters Hashim Thaçi, Agim Çeku and Ramush Haradinaj, the KLA, aligned with Italian Mafiosi and Turkish crime bosses and ran highly-profitable heroin and prostitution rackets across Europe.

In 1999, The Montreal Gazette published an exposé reporting that “Kosovar Albanian rebels were linked to drugs by narcotics experts in Europe as early as 1994, while U.S. authorities warned in 1996 that Kosovars were smuggling large amounts of weapons and drugs. Police in various Western nations also noted the rising proportion of heroin being shipped to their countries through the Balkans, and the rise in crime and overdose deaths that accompanied the drug.”

Michael Levine, a 25-year DEA veteran and whistleblower who currently co-hosts The Expert Witness Radio Show, told the Gazette there was “no question” that American secret state agencies knew about the KLA’s drug ties.

“They (the CIA) protected them (the KLA) in every way they could,” Levine said. “As long as the CIA is protecting the KLA, you’ve got major drug pipelines protected from any police investigation.”

Writing for the World Socialist Web Site, analyst Michel Chossudovsky reported that “While KLA leaders were shaking hands with US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright at Rambouillet, Europol (the European Police Organization based in The Hague) was ‘preparing a report for European interior and justice ministers on a connection between the KLA and Albanian drug gangs’.”

“In order to thrive,” Chossudovsky averred, “the criminal syndicates involved in the Balkans narcotics trade need friends in high places. Smuggling rings with alleged links to the Turkish State are said to control the trafficking of heroin through the Balkans ‘cooperating closely with other groups with which they have political or religious ties’ including criminal groups in Albanian and Kosovo. In this new global financial environment, powerful undercover political lobbies connected to organized crime cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment.”

Following NATO’s 78-day bombing campaign, a template for today’s State Department-fomented “humanitarian interventions,” the former socialist Yugoslavia lay in ruins, the KLA had their narco-state and the Pentagon had Camp Bondsteel. By 2000, Thaçi’s “boys” had pushed aside Turkish and Italian mobsters and took control of the lucrative Balkan heroin pipeline and harvested human organs for sale on the international black market.

It was a victory all around.

We should keep Chossudovsky’s point in mind today, as “undercover political lobbies” such as the terrorist Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK) and their various fronts such as the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) “cultivate links to prominent political figures and officials of the military and intelligence establishment,” showering U.S. politicians and military elites with millions of dollars in “speaking fees” from unknown sources as The Christian Science Monitor exposed.

The New ‘Heroin Connection’

If the prospect of a “nuclear-armed” Iran isn’t enough to send red-blooded, God fearin’ Americans into a tizzy, then consider this zinger from RFE/RL: “U.S. Says Iranian General Instrumental In Afghan Drug Traffic.”

That’s right, the CIA’s former propaganda mouthpiece Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, smelling blood in the water and itching for a fight, informed us last week that the Obama administration “has named a general in Iran’s elite Al-Quds force as a key figure in trafficking heroin from Afghanistan.”

According to the U.S. Treasury Department, “General General Gholamreza Baghbani, who runs the Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force office in Zahedan,” has been designated a “narcotics kingpin.”

We’re told that Baghbani has been accused “of aiding Afghan drug runners in moving opiates into and through Iran, as well helping send weapons to the Taliban.”

Guns in, drugs out; while it has a familiar ring to it, are we talking about Iran or NATO’s Central Asian outpost, Afghanistan?

According to a 1998 timeline inserted into the Congressional Record during the mark-up for the 1999 Intelligence Authorization Act we read the following:

Soviet-backed coup in Afghanistan sets stage for explosive growth in Southwest Asian heroin trade. New Marxist regime undertakes vigorous anti-narcotics campaign aimed at suppressing poppy production, triggering a revolt by semi-autonomous tribal groups that traditionally raised opium for export. The CIA-supported rebel Mujahedeen begins expanding production to finance their insurgency. Between 1982 and 1989, during which time the CIA ships billions of dollars in weapons and other aid to guerrilla forces, annual opium production in Afghanistan increases to about 800 tons from 250 tons. By 1986, the State Department admits that Afghanistan is ‘probably the world’s largest producer of opium for export’ and ‘the poppy source for a majority of the Southwest Asian heroin found in the United States.’ U.S. officials, however, fail to take action to curb production. Their silence not only serves to maintain public support for the Mujahedeen, it also smooths relations with Pakistan, whose leaders, deeply implicated in the heroin trade, help channel CIA support to the Afghan rebels.

Since the 2001 U.S.-led invasion that pattern has been repeated. Afghan opium and heroin production has skyrocketed, primarily because NATO forces have aligned themselves, and propped up, those responsible for the dramatic rise in poppy cultivation: Hamid Karzai’s warlord-infested narco-state. But rather than pointing a finger at the source of what amount to protected drug rackets–the CIA and NATO–RFE/RL and their media accomplices are stitching-up the Islamic Republic for a fall. One more reason then, for launching a preemptive war.

But Iranian officials have charged that opium and heroin production in Afghanistan have had a severe impact inside Iran and, like Russia, have accused the U.S. of turning a blind eye when it comes to fighting opium production. Indeed, Sergei Blagov reported for ISN Security Watch that “Russia’s top officials have described the situation as ‘narco-aggression’ against Russia and a new ‘opium war’.”

“The Russian press,” Blagov wrote, “has been even less diplomatic, claiming that US and NATO forces were directly involved in the drug trade. Russian media outlets allege that the bulk of the drugs produced in Afghanistan’s southern and western provinces are shipped abroad on US planes.”

Commenting on the “creative destruction” wrought by NATO, former British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, wrote in The Daily Mail that the West’s “economic achievement in Afghanistan goes well beyond the simple production of raw opium. In fact Afghanistan no longer exports much raw opium at all. It has succeeded in what our international aid efforts urge every developing country to do. Afghanistan has gone into manufacturing and ‘value-added’ operations.”

According to Murray, facts clearly established by multiple law enforcement agencies, Afghanistan “now exports not opium, but heroin. Opium is converted into heroin on an industrial scale, not in kitchens but in factories. Millions of gallons of the chemicals needed for this process are shipped into Afghanistan by tanker. The tankers and bulk opium lorries on the way to the factories share the roads, improved by American aid, with Nato troops.”

“How can this have happened, and on this scale?” Murray wonders. “The answer is simple. The four largest players in the heroin business are all senior members of the Afghan government–the government that our soldiers are fighting and dying to protect.”

But let’s not let anything as inconvenient as facts get in the way of stopping Qom’s “new Hitlers”!

Far from being complicit in the drug trade, as Reuters reported, while Iran “is a main transit route for bringing heroin and opium to Western markets from Asia … the United Nations’ top anti-drugs official in Tehran praised the country for its efforts in stopping traffickers and seizing narcotics.”

“Definitely drug control is one of the positive stories (from Iran),” said Roberto Arbitrio, representative of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC).”

“This is the first country in the world in terms of opiate seizures,” he told the news agency in an interview, referring to opium, morphine and heroin. “Last year it was 300 tons.”

If ubiquitous facts on the ground speak volumes then, as Reuters disclosed, “Iran’s campaign was showing results with the country seizing an estimated 20-40 percent of trafficked volumes, as compared to 5-10 percent in the United States and Europe;” a telling statistic not likely to be repeated by war-hungry media in the West.

Indeed, UNODOC reported last November that Iran, along with Afghanistan and Pakistan have entered into an agreement “designed to strengthen drug control among the three countries most seriously affected by Afghan opium. The initiative promotes information exchange and intelligence-led operations targeting the major transnational networks.”

“All three parties,” UNODOC’s Executive Director Yury Fedotov averred, have launched a “Triangular Initiative” that has already boosted “their cross-border counter-narcotics capacities.” Tellingly, a “joint planning cell has been established in Tehran to enhance analytical and operational capacity and to launch joint operations.” (emphasis added)

According to Fedotov, the planning and operational cell “has notched up successes. Since 2009, 12 drug control operations coordinated by the joint planning cell have resulted in the seizures of several tons of illicit drugs and the arrest of many drug traffickers.”

This is certainly not the message that war planners in Washington care to hear. But what can we learn closer to home where the Obama administration has the media’s ear and can exert influence over own America’s benighted “War on Drugs”?

When two planes filled with nearly ten tons of coke were seized in Mexico, in commercial jets tricked-out to resemble those flown by the Department of Homeland Security (see Daniel Hopsicker’s eye-opening archive on the story) or when the fourth largest U.S. bank, Wachovia, pled guilty to laundering $378.4 billion in drug money for Mexican drug cartels and got off with a slap on the wrist, or when the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms let guns “walk” across the border, right into the hands of the CIA’s favorite narcotrafficking gang, the Sinaloa Cartel as Bill Conroy over at Narco News exposed (see the archive here), corporate media responded with a collective yawn.

In fact, Narco News revealed in December that in an upcoming trial in Chicago of one of the Sinaloa cartel’s top leaders, Jesus Vicente Zambada Niebla, federal prosecutors are seeking to bar defense evidence that U.S. government agencies, including the CIA and the DEA, had “entered into a pact with the leadership of the Mexican Sinaloa narco-trafficking organization that supposedly provide its chief narcos with immunity in exchange for them providing US authorities with information that could be used to target other narco-trafficking organizations.”

Conroy disclosed that “US prosecutors do confirm in court filings that another high-level Sinaloa ‘Cartel’ member, Mexican attorney Loya Castro, has worked as a DEA cooperating source for some 10 years (and as recently as this year) while also working for the Sinaloa organization.”

“Loya Castro, Narco News revealed, “acted as the intermediary representing the Sinaloa organization in its quid pro quo arrangement with the US government, Zambada Niebla’s court pleadings allege.” Indeed, to protect their dirty deals with Mexico’s largest drug gang, a multibillion dollar enterprise whose tentacles stretch across the Americas, the “US government, in court pleadings filed in September, lodged a motion in the case seeking to invoke the Classified Information Procedures Act, or CIPA, a measure designed to assure national security information does not become public during court proceedings.”

What might threaten America’s “national security,” pray tell?

As Daniel Hopsicker disclosed last summer, when “embattled” acting ATF director Kenneth Melson testified before Congress he refused “to go down for a program [Fast and Furious] which he had little or nothing to do with originating.”

Pointing a finger at U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, Melson told congressional grifters that “the evidence we have gathered raises the disturbing possibility that the Justice Department not only allowed criminals to smuggle weapons but that taxpayer dollars from other agencies may have financed those engaging in such activities.”

As Hopsicker pointed out, those “shadowy other government agencies” is “the very definition of the CIA.”

Hopsicker asked: “If the CIA is arming Mexican drug cartels, might they not also have been behind the otherwise-puzzling effort to supply these same drug lords with top-quality American-registered airplanes and jets?”

“Were the two now-infamous American-registered planes busted in Mexico’s Yucatan carrying almost ten tons of cocaine part of this same so-far unnamed Operation behind the ATF’s Operation Gunwalker?”

As we now know, at least one of the drug planes, “a Gulfstream business jet (N987SA)” Hopsicker revealed, were part of a fleet of fifty planes purchased through money laundered by Wachovia Bank as both Bloomberg Markets Magazine and The Observer reported, at least one of which were used to transport kidnapped “terrorist” suspects on CIA “ghost flights.”

But that’s all the past, we should “look forward, not backward.” Why bother with “ancient history” when there’s a new war to gin-up?

According to the Treasury Department press release, “The U.S. Department of the Treasury today designated Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Qods Force (IRGC-QF) General Gholamreza Baghbani as a Specially Designated Narcotics Trafficker pursuant to the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act (Kingpin Act). This is the first use of the Kingpin Act against an Iranian official.”

“Today’s action exposes IRGC-QF involvement in trafficking narcotics, made doubly reprehensible here because it is done as part of a broader scheme to support terrorism. Treasury will continue exposing narcotics traffickers and terrorist supporters wherever they operate,” said Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen.

If Treasury Department allegations can be believed, and given Cohen’s role as Obama’s point-man for enforcing Iran sanctions the charges reek to high-heaven. “General Baghbani,” we’re told, “allowed Afghan narcotics traffickers to smuggle opiates through Iran in return for assistance. For example, Afghan narcotics traffickers moved weapons to the Taliban on behalf of Baghbani. In return, General Baghbani has helped facilitate the smuggling of heroin precursor chemicals through the Iranian border. He also helped facilitate shipments of opium into Iran.”

Jumping feet first into the fray, the right-wing Long War Journal, charge that “Al Qaeda is also known to facilitate travel for its operatives moving into Afghanistan from Mashad. Al Qaeda additionally uses the eastern [Iranian] cities of Tayyebat and Zahedan to funnel its operatives into Afghanistan.”

We’re told that “several [unnamed] Taliban commanders based in western Afghanistan have stated that they have received weapons, cash, and training from Iranian forces. Taliban commanders and units train inside Iran to conduct attacks against NATO and Afghan forces. In addition, al Qaeda operatives are also known to receive support from the Ansar Corps; Mashad is a transit point for al Qaeda operatives en route to Afghanistan.”

LWJ’s “proof”? Why none other than a 2010 statement from disgraced ISAF commander General Stanley McCrystal, who said that “Iran is training Taliban fighters and providing them with weapons”! Case closed, right?

But as with last year’s discredited Iranian “Qods Force” plot to assassinate Saudi ambassador Adel al-Jubeir in an upscale Washington restaurant, evidence has since emerged that a key figure named in the conspiracy by failed Texas used-car salesman, Manssor Arbabsiar, alleged Iranian Revolutionary Guard officer Gholam Shakuri, has been fingered by Iranian officials and Interpol as a member of the Mojahedin e-Khalq (MEK), according to Tehran Times.

Mehr News Agency reported that “Interpol has found new evidence showing that the number two suspect in connection with the alleged Iranian government’s involvement in a plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador to Washington is a key member of the terrorist Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO).”

According to Mehr, “Gholam Shakuri was last seen in Washington and Camp Ashraf in Iraq where MKO members are based.”

Citing an Interpol report, the news agency alleged that “the person in question has been travelling to different countries under the names of Ali Shakuri/Gholam Shakuri/Gholam-Hossein Shakuri by using fake passports including forged Iranian passports. One passport used by the person was issued on 30/11/2006 in Washington. The passport number was K10295631.”

As with the now-discredited plot to assassinate the Saudi ambassador, allegedly to be carried out in cahoots with a member of Mexico’s violence-prone Zetas Cartel, who turned out to be a DEA informant, Treasury Department charges against General Gholamreza Baghbani should be taken with a grain of salt.

As journalist Gareth Porter noted in his investigation of the Arbabsiar plot, “the allegations that the Iranian-American used car salesman wanted to ‘attack’ the Saudi embassy and other targets rest entirely upon the testimony of the DEA informant with whom he was meeting. The informant is a drug dealer who had been indicted for a narcotics violation in a US state but had the charges dropped ‘in exchange for cooperation in various drug investigations,’ according to the FBI account. The informant is not an independent source of information, but someone paid to help pursue FBI objectives.”

Coming just days before the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT), bowing to U.S. pressure, cut off 30 Iranian financial institutions, including its Central Bank, from its network in a bid to cripple Iran economically, the allegations against Baghbani should be viewed as another psychological component of America’s shadow war.

With lurid tales of Iranian involvement with the Taliban and the drug trade front and center, expect a new round of alarmist reports from Western media while the same punditocracy do their best to bury evidence of U.S. secret state complicity in the global drug scourge.

And why not? As Antonio Maria Costa, the head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime told The Observer in 2009, “he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were ‘the only liquid investment capital’ available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.”

After all, $352 billion buys a lot of omertà.

According to the Oxford Companion to the Bible, Esther is “best understood as a novella.” Its date cannot “be determined with any precision,” but is “clearly one of the latest books in the Hebrew Bible.” It’s apparently set during the reign of the Persian king Xerxes, who reigned between 486 and 485 BCE, although some suggest it’s set during the later reign of Artaxerxes. In any case, it may have been composed as late as 100 BCE, long after the events it purports to depict. It is fiction.

The body of the text, written in Hebrew, is supplemented by substantial interpolations composed in Greek.

In the plausible historical record, the elite of the kingdom of Judah were transported to Babylon in 587 BCE, as punishment for resisting the Assyrian Empire. (The bulk of the population of that kingdom were probably never removed but remained in place during the “Babylonian Captivity.”) In 538, Cyrus the Persian conquered the Neo-Babylonian Empire and allowed the Jews to return to their homeland and rebuild their temple; this is why Cyrus–the founder of Persia (Iran)–is glorified in the Bible as a servant of God (Isaiah 44:28 and in various passages in the books of Ezra and Daniel).

So far we are on firm historical ground. It was customary for empires in the ancient Middle East to displace and relocate whole peoples. Members of the elites in Judah and Israel did spend part of the sixth century BCE in Babylonian exile. Many stayed or ventured beyond, forming communities as far afield as India. The Iranian Jewish community dates its origins to this period.

But this book, which Netanyahu gifted Obama, does not reflect the realities of the Jewish past in Iran. It is rather a highly fanciful tale of how Jews at one point in the past supposedly escaped persecution due to the wisdom of the Jewess Esther–who becomes the queen of Persia–and her cousin Mordecai.

(It was written at a time when the question of Jewish intermarriage with non-Jews was a matter of considerable debate. In the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, for example, the priests discourage Jewish men from mixing their “holy seed” with Egyptians, Moabites, Amorites etc.; see Ezra 9:12. But the whole point of the Book of Ruth, a novelette written about the same time, is that a Gentile–Moabite–woman can be a good wife and make the Jewish god her own. The Book of Esther should be seen in that context. In the Hebrew version she seems comfortable enough being Persian queen. But in the extended Greek version, she abhors “the bed on the uncircumcised and of any alien.”)

In this book, Mordecai (“one of the captives whom King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon had brought from Jerusalem”) has a dream in which the “righteous nation” is threatened but then “exalted” due to divine intervention. He himself advances in society after exposing a plot of eunuchs to kill the king; two of the wicked eunuchs are executed, and he himself is honored. Meanwhile the court official Haman, who had been close to the eunuchs, conspires to injure Mordecai and his people.

The king becomes upset with his wife Vashti for refusing to appear with him publicly. He sees her behavior as a precedent that might cause women to “dare to insult their husbands” (Esther 1:18) and so issues a decree that “in every house respect would be shown to every husband” (1:22). He searches around for an alternative consort.

Mordecai then arranges for the king to meet his cousin Esther, and she receives his favor (while concealing her ethnicity). Haman, upset with Esther’s rise in favor, and the refusal of Mordecai to pay him due deference, and angered by the rise of the Jews at court, tells the king, “There is a certain nation scattered among all the other nations in your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other nations, and they do not keep the laws of the king. It is not expedient of the king to tolerate them…” (Esther 8:8). He recommends they be “destroyed.” The (rather malleable) king following his advice issues an order for Jewish annihilation.

There is no evidence this ever happened. There’s no evidence that the Zoroastrian elite in ancient Persia were ever interested in oppressing Jews for religious reasons, much less wiping them out. (Indeed the evidence suggests that Jews in exile were deeply influenced by Persian religion, including the concepts of paradise, the end of time, and a messiah).

In any case, in the story, Mordecai protests publicly. Esther supports him and goes to the king. At the sight of her face “God changed the spirit of the” apparently rather mercurial, malleable king “to gentleness.” Esther revealing her ethnic identity soon persuades him to save Jewry and execute the evil Haman (7:10).

It’s not a terribly interesting story, and if it has any historical value at all, it merely suggests that in the Persian Empire the exiles from Israel and Judah had considerable influence and also confronted opposition and resentment. Why would Netanyahu recommend it to Obama for “background reading”?

Just a hunch: in this fictional piece, Jews confront the power of Persia–the greatest empire of the time, extending “from India to Ethiopia” (Esther 1:1), creatively and indirectly. Mordecai engineers his cousin (“fair and beautiful… admired by all who saw her”) into a position of power and uses her to bring down Haman, who would annihilate Jewry.

Isn’t Netanyahu pressing Obama to bring down the Iranian regime, while arguing that Tehran is hell-bent on nuking the Jewish state? And isn’t that charge as baseless as the fairy tales in the Book of Esther?

Last Saturday The Daily Telegraph, citing The Wall Street Journal, reported that “military planners have asked for emergency funding from Congress to address a perceived shortfall in defence capabilities that could undermine the ability of US forces to respond to an Iranian closure of the Strait of Hormuz.”

Plans are underway “to modify weapons systems on ships that are at present vulnerable to Iranian fast-attack boats, many of which carry anti-ship missiles,” the Telegraph averred.

Feeling the heat from pro-Israeli lobby shops and congressional grifters, President Obama told The Atlantic on Friday:

When I say we’re not taking any option off the table, we mean it. I think that the Israeli government recognizes that, as president of the United States, I don’t bluff. I also don’t, as a matter of sound policy, go around advertising exactly what our intentions are. But I think both the Iranian and the Israeli governments recognize that when the United States says it is unacceptable for Iran to have a nuclear weapon, we mean what we say.

In other words, despite repeated assertions by Iran that its nuclear program is strictly for civilian, not military, purposes facts borne out by multiple on-the-ground inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency and assessments by American spy agencies, the bar for Iranian “compliance” is continually set higher, moved from an “active program” to a mere “capability,” it is now clear that war is the first, last, indeed only “option.”

With this mind, Times’ journalists James Risen and Mark Mazzetti informed us that lying “at the center of the debate is the murky question of the ultimate ambitions of the leaders in Tehran.”

While there is “no dispute among American, Israeli and European intelligence officials that Iran has been enriching nuclear fuel and developing some necessary infrastructure to become a nuclear power,” the Times disclosed that secret state agencies also “believe that Iran has yet to decide whether to resume a parallel program to design a nuclear warhead–a program they believe was essentially halted in 2003 and which would be necessary for Iran to build a nuclear bomb.”

In his January 31 Senate testimony, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper “stated explicitly that American officials believe that Iran is preserving its options for a nuclear weapon, but said there was no evidence that it had made a decision on making a concerted push to build a weapon.”

Clapper’s assessment is shared by other top Obama administration officials including CIA Director David Petraeus, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey.

According to the Times:

Intelligence officials and outside analysts believe there is another possible explanation for Iran’s enrichment activity, besides a headlong race to build a bomb as quickly as possible. They say that Iran could be seeking to enhance its influence in the region by creating what some analysts call ‘strategic ambiguity’.

Given the belligerent rhetoric and hostile military maneuvers by the United States, Israel and NATO, why wouldn’t the Iranians aim for “strategic ambiguity” in their dealings with the West?

Ringed by U.S. military bases, targets of a CIA/Mossad “active program” to assassinate scientists, bomb military installations, wage cyberwar against nuclear facilities and impose crippling sanctions intended to crater their economy, it’s surprising the Iranians haven’t sought the illusory “security” afforded by possessing nuclear weapons!

Disappeared History

While disinformation specialists such as The Washington Post’s Joby Warrick shamefully assert that “Iran already has enough enriched uranium to build four nuclear weapons,” he trumpets this specious charge–and gets away with it–by hiding behind the skirts of anonymous “U.S. officials and nuclear experts.”

In fact, Iran’s “Supreme Leader,” Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stated the obvious not only for Iranians but for the entire planet:

We believe that using nuclear weapons is haram and prohibited, and that it is everybody’s duty to make efforts to protect humanity against this great disaster.

Khamenei, the head of Tehran’s repressive mullahocracy, whose hand was strengthened in recent parliamentary elections, also reiterated that “besides nuclear weapons, other types of weapons of mass destruction such as chemical and biological weapons also pose a serious threat to humanity.”

“The Iranian nation which is itself a victim of chemical weapons feels more than any other nation the danger that is caused by the production and stockpiling of such weapons and is prepared to make use of all its facilities to counter such threats,” Khamenei declared.

The Grand Ayatollah pointedly alluded to chemical attacks on Iran during the 1980-1988 war with Iraq.

Though studiously ignored by corporate media in today’s rush to war, we would do well to recall that Iraq had been given a green light to invade the Islamic Republic by the Carter administration.

During that period, Western-supplied technology and logistical support, including geospatial intelligence provided by America’s fleet of spy satellites, along with billions of dollars in arms provided by Britain, France, Germany and the United States were lavished on Iraq when Saddam was America’s “best friend forever.” American and European firms literally handed over the know-how that allowed Iraq to kill and maim Iranian civilians and soldiers during that disastrous war. By the conflict’s end, Iran had suffered an estimated one million casualties, killed or wounded, and the near-destruction of their economy.

Investigative journalist Alan Friedman, the author of Spider’s Web: The secret history of how the White House illegally armed Iraq, documented how early in the conflict, the U.S. began providing tactical battlefield advice to the Iraqi Army.

“At times,” Friedman wrote, “thanks to the White House’s secret backing for the intelligence-sharing, U.S. intelligence officers were actually sent to Baghdad to help interpret the satellite information. As the White House took an increasingly active role in secretly helping Saddam direct his armed forces, the United States even built an expensive high-tech annex in Baghdad to provide a direct down-link receiver for the satellite intelligence and better processing of the information.”

According to Friedman’s definitive account: “The American military commitment that had begun with intelligence-sharing expanded rapidly and surreptitiously throughout the Iran–Iraq War. A former White House official explained that ‘by 1987, our people were actually providing tactical military advice to the Iraqis in the battlefield, and sometimes they would find themselves over the Iranian border, alongside Iraqi troops’.

But such support was not limited to providing advice and battlefield intelligence to Saddam’s generals; it also extended to Iraqi procurement of banned chemical and biological weapons, actual “weapons of mass destruction,” backed by billions of dollars in loan guarantees extended to Iraq by the U.S. Commerce Department.

Indeed, as Scotland’s Sunday Herald reported more than a decade ago, months before America and Britain’s rush to war with Iraq, an investigation all but suppressed by American media, “The US and Britain sold Saddam Hussein the technology and materials Iraq needed to develop nuclear, chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction.”

Investigative journalists Neil Mackay and Felicity Arbuthnot reported at the time that:

The US Senate’s committee on banking, housing and urban affairs–which oversees American exports policy–reveal that the US, under the successive administrations of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr, sold materials including anthrax, VX nerve gas, West Nile fever germs and botulism to Iraq right up until March 1992, as well as germs similar to tuberculosis and pneumonia. Other bacteria sold included brucella melitensis, which damages major organs, and clostridium perfringens, which causes gas gangrene.

Weapons that were used to deadly effect against Iran with the full knowledge, and complicity, of Western governments.

As Fars News Agency reported last June, Iran’s Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani “condemned the use of chemical weapons against innocent people throughout the world, and lamented that the Iranians who came under Iraq’s chemical attacks during the imposed war on Iran (1980-1988) are still suffering from the impacts of these invasions.”

“On June 28, 1987,” Fars reported, “Iraqi aircraft dropped what Iranian authorities believed to be mustard gas bombs on Sardasht, in two separate bombing runs on four residential areas.”

“Sardasht was the first town in the world to be gassed. Out of a population of 20,000, 25% are still suffering severe illnesses from the attacks.”

As the National Security Archive revealed in declassified documents published in 2003:

By the summer of 1983 Iran had been reporting Iraqi use of using chemical weapons for some time. The Geneva protocol requires that the international community respond to chemical warfare, but a diplomatically isolated Iran received only a muted response to its complaints. It intensified its accusations in October 1983, however, and in November asked for a United Nations Security Council investigation.

What was the Reagan administration’s response?

A State Department account indicates that the administration had decided to limit its ‘efforts against the Iraqi CW program to close monitoring because of our strict neutrality in the Gulf war, the sensitivity of sources, and the low probability of achieving desired results’.

Those “desired results”? The destruction of Iran by Saddam’s military, propped-up by the repressive Gulf monarchies that now constitute the Gulf Cooperation Council (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates) whom Asia Times Online analyst Pepe Escobar has characterized as the “Gulf Counter-Revolution Club” and “NATOGCC.”

Indeed, as the Archive revealed:

The department noted in late November 1983 that ‘with the essential assistance of foreign firms, Iraq ha[d] become able to deploy and use CW and probably has built up large reserves of CW for further use. Given its desperation to end the war, Iraq may again use lethal or incapacitating CW, particularly if Iran threatens to break through Iraqi lines in a large-scale attack’.

Meanwhile, by 1984 “Ronald Reagan issued another presidential directive (NSDD 139), emphasizing the U.S. objective of ensuring access to military facilities in the Gulf region, and instructing the director of central intelligence and the secretary of defense to upgrade U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities.”

According to documents published by the Archive, “It codified U.S. determination to develop plans ‘to avert an Iraqi collapse.’ Reagan’s directive said that U.S. policy required ‘unambiguous’ condemnation of chemical warfare (without naming Iraq), while including the caveat that the U.S. should ‘place equal stress on the urgent need to dissuade Iran from continuing the ruthless and inhumane tactics which have characterized recent offensives.’ The directive does not suggest that ‘condemning’ chemical warfare required any hesitation about or modification of U.S. support for Iraq.”

As we now know, U.S. support continued and American and British firms supplied Iraq with chemical precursors used in the manufacture of chemical weapons subsequently deployed against the Iranian city of Sardasht, whose inhabitants “are still suffering severe illnesses from the attacks,” as Fars noted.

Bottom line for the Reagan administration’s State Department? “Gas the hajis and let God sort ‘em out!”

Another ‘Just War’ on the Horizon

As with the Bush administration’s ginned-up “evidence” used to slaughter some million Iraqis when the U.S. launched its “preemptive and premeditated” invasion of Iraq in 2003, as the National Security Archive disclosed, U.S. perception management over the use of banned weapons reflected “the realpolitik that determined this country’s policies during the years when Iraq was actually employing chemical weapons. Actual rather than rhetorical opposition to such use was evidently not perceived to serve U.S. interests.”

Indeed, the “U.S. was concerned with its ability to project military force in the Middle East, and to keep the oil flowing.”

Fast forward to 2012 and the manufactured hysteria over an “aggressive” Iran’s alleged pursuit of nuclear deterrence.

Is there a disconnect here? What “red line” have the Iranians allegedly “crossed” that would necessitate extorting billions of dollars from our disreputable Congress for war while Americans go hungry and lose their homes, congressional thieves in thrall to pro-Israel lobby groups and the Military-Industrial cabal of war profiteers who pull their collective strings? Are we to flatten yet another nation that hasn’t attacked us solely on the basis of ill-defined “ultimate ambitions”?

Increasingly, it looks like the answer is yes.

The Associated Press reported Tuesday that an unnamed “U.S. intelligence official” familiar with discussions amongst top administration officials and their Israeli counterparts averred that Israel “won’t warn the U.S. if they decide to launch a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.”

Why not? Well, we’re supposed to believe a ludicrous fairy tale spun by Benjamin Netanyahu’s unhinged government that keeping “the Americans in the dark” would actually “decrease the likelihood that the U.S. would be held responsible for failing to stop Israel’s potential attack.”

Washington “peacemakers” eager to “avoid” war with the Islamic Republic, including senior “U.S. intelligence and special operations officials,” AP reported, “have tried to keep a dialogue going with Israel” by “sharing options such as allowing Israel to use U.S. bases in the region from which to launch such a strike, as a way to make sure the Israelis give the Americans a heads-up, according to the U.S. official, and a former U.S. official with knowledge of the communications.”

With this in mind, Haaretz reported that “Netanyahu is expected to publicly harden his line against Iran during a meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington on March 5, according to a senior Israeli official.”

Correspondent Barak Ravid disclosed that Israel is demanding that Obama “make further-reaching declarations than the vague assertion that ‘all options are on the table’.” In fact, Netanyahu “wants Obama to state unequivocally that the United States is preparing for a military operation in the event that Iran crosses certain ‘red lines’.”

Apparently, administration officials and Pentagon war planners got the message. On Thursday, Bloomberg News reported that “the U.S. could join Israel in attacking Iran if the Islamic republic doesn’t dispel concerns that its nuclear-research program is aimed at producing weapons.”

“Four days before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is scheduled to arrive in Washington,” Bloomberg averred, “Air Force Chief of Staff General Norton Schwartz told reporters the Joint Chiefs of Staff have prepared military options to strike Iranian nuclear sites in the event of a conflict.”

“What we can do, you wouldn’t want to be in the area,” Schwartz told reporters in Washington.

In keeping with Obama’s statement that his administration is marching in “lockstep” with Israel, “Pentagon officials said military options being prepared start with providing aerial refueling for Israeli planes and include attacking the pillars of the clerical regime, including the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its elite Qods Force, regular Iranian military bases and the Ministry of Intelligence and Security.”

The Guardian disclosed on Friday that “Israel is to test an advanced anti-ballistic missile system in the coming weeks, inevitably fuelling speculation about preparations for a possible military confrontation with Iran.”

“The unusual advance notification of the test,” The Guardian noted, “follows an unannounced test in November of a long-range ballistic missile that intensified speculation that Israel was preparing for a military strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities.”

Just yesterday, TASS disclosed that “the carrier group of the USS Carl Vinson has re-entered the Gulf. Another US carrier group, of the USS Abraham Lincoln, continues to patrol the Arabian Sea just south of the Strait of Hormuz. It is backed by three attack submarines, one of which is carrying 154 Tomahawk missiles.”

In other words, preparations for a joint U.S.-Israeli-NATO attack will target Iran’s entire defense infrastructure, and in all likelihood its civilian infrastructure as well, in preparation of Washington’s long-standing goal of “regime change.”

Driving home the point that the United States is preparing to launch a new war of aggression in the Middle East, The Washington Post reported last week that contingency plans have already been drawn up for attacking the Fordow nuclear facility.

“Built into a mountain bunkers designed to withstand an aerial attack,” Pentagon stenographer Joby Warrick informed us, “U.S. military planners … are increasingly confident about their ability to deliver a serious blow against Fordow should the president ever order an attack.”

“In arguing their case, U.S. officials acknowledged some uncertainty over whether even the Pentagon’s newest bunker-buster weapon–called the Massive Ordnance Penetrator–could pierce in a single blow the subterranean chambers where Iran is making enriched uranium,” Warrick wrote.

However, “a sustained U.S. attack over multiple days would probably render the plant unusable by collapsing tunnels and irreparably damaging both its highly sensitive centrifuge equipment and the miles of pipes, tubes and wires required to operate it.”

“If you can target the one piece of critical equipment instead of the whole thing, isn’t that just as good?” an anonymous official told the Post. “Even by reducing the entrances to rubble, you’ve effectively entombed the site.”

It isn’t just centrifuges, however, that American and Israeli war criminals plan to “entomb.”

Close aides to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Tel Aviv’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper Wednesday that “Iran’s citizens should be starved in order to curb Tehran’s nuclear program.”

“Suffocating sanctions could lead to a grave economic situation in Iran and to a shortage of food,” YNET’s anonymous source said. “This would force the regime to consider whether the nuclear adventure is worthwhile, while the Persian people have nothing to eat and may rise up as was the case in Syria, Tunisia and other Arab states.”

“The Western world led by the United States must implement stifling sanctions at this time already, rather than wait or hesitate,” YNET disclosed. “In order to suffocate Iran economically and diplomatically and lead the regime there to a hopeless situation, this must be done now, without delay.”

As left-wing analyst Richard Silverstein pointed out on the Tikun Olam web site: “Keep in mind, this particular gem of an Israeli isn’t advocating merely putting Iran ‘on a diet’ as Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon’s advisor, did toward Gaza. He’s advocating death, malnutrition, pestilence: the whole nine yards of incremental genocide.”

“It’s especially telling that this genius came up with such a policy proposal on the eve of Bibi’s trip to Washington to meet with Pres. Obama, who will certainly warm to such an idea,” Silverstein noted. “I guess the Israelis must see this as an ice-breaker to bring the two leaders, who have a history of icy relations, closer.”

Mass starvation? Genocide? No problem!

And why not? After all, as Karl Rove told journalist Ron Suskind back in 2004: “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.”

But as Iran specialist Gary Sick recently observed in Le Monde Diplomatique, “When sanctions began Iran had only a rudimentary nuclear programme, without a single centrifuge. Today, after 16 years of ever-stronger sanctions, the IAEA reports that Iran has a substantial nuclear programme with some 8,000 operational centrifuges installed in two major sites, and a stockpile of about five tons of low-enriched uranium. This is the definition of a failed policy.”

“The US and its allies have responded by increasing the sanctions to a point where Iran would no longer be able to sell its petroleum products, depriving it of more than 50% of its revenues. This amounts to a military blockade of Iranian oil ports, an act of war,” Sick wrote.

“So sanctions, supposed to be the alternative to war, are gradually morphing into economic warfare. The point at which economic pressure becomes undeclared war will be reached by mid-2012 when near-total boycotts of Iranian banks and Iranian oil by the US and the EU will formally take effect. No one can be sure how Iran will respond, but it is difficult to believe it will meekly surrender or simply do nothing.”

And when Obama and Netanyahu meet tomorrow in Washington, “neither heads of state will have to worry too much about plotting their war on Iran. Pentagon officials are saying that those wheels are already in motion,” Russia Today noted.

“With Obama preparing to go before the AIPAC conference this weekend, there are already talks that the United States’ commander-in-chief is considering giving in to Israeli pressure to align against Iran with force, fearing what repercussions could come on Election Day should he walk,” RT observed.

Although “Obama has been hesitant to throw his weight behind any actual endorsements of war so far–and much to the chagrin of Israel–but this week’s meeting between Barak and Panetta suggest that Obama may soon crack.”

Should the United States engage Iran militarily however, it just might be more than Obama that would “soon crack.”

As Global Research analyst Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya warned, citing the results of a 2002 Pentagon war game: “Iran would react to U.S. aggression by launching a massive barrage of missiles that would overwhelm the U.S. and destroy sixteen U.S. naval vessels–an aircraft carrier, ten cruisers, and five amphibious ships. It is estimated that if this had happened in real war theater context, more than 20,000 U.S. servicemen would have been killed in the first day following the attack.”

While we do not know where belligerent moves by the West will lead, it is also clear that despite these threats Iran will “not go gentle into that good night.”

Meanwhile, in the economic and military sphere, the drum beat continues essentially the same as it ever did. There is no doubt who won the battles of the Sixties in those arenas: big business and the Pentagon. Even though union membership is down drastically from its heyday years of the 1960s, a concerted drive to destroy the unions that remain has kicked into high gear. While governments and big business work together to disempower the remaining unions, the demagogues among them work overtime in their attempts to tie every problem the common man and woman has to those workers that dare to fight for their union. Instead of talking honestly about the failures of neoliberalism, right wing corporate shills denounce school teachers and nurses for demanding a decent wage while simultaneously privatizing whatever services they can. Unemployment remains high, especially among black men, who have only known full employment when they were forced to work as slaves. Indeed, the only place where most African-American men are working is in the network of prisons across the USA, where they work for minimal wages while reaping profits for Wall Street corporations that have the taxpayers pay the bills those prisons rack up. It can be reasonably argued that US prisons are the historical successors to those plantations where many of today’s prisoners’ ancestors worked.

September 13, 1971 is a day I will never forget. It was my sixteenth birthday, but that fact serves only as a marker for the unforgettable events of that historical moment. On September 8, 1971 several hundred men at Attica State prison in New York took over a part of the prison. This act was the direct result of a scuffle that occurred in what was known as D Yard. In truth, though, it was the culmination of a months-long campaign for prison reforms in Attica and other prisons in the New York system. It can actually be argued that the campaign in New York was part of a larger campaign that was occurring across the United States. This upsurge in the prison struggle had been fueled by other movements in the US and also by a growing awareness of the role prisons play in the oppression of disenfranchised groups in a society. The assassination of Black Panther George Jackson barely a month before the uprising at Attica served as a vicious reminder of how far the State would go to maintain that oppression.

Back to the story of September 13, 1971. As I sat at the dinner table that evening I simmered with anger. That morning Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York had ordered an assault on Attica which resulted in the deaths of 39 men, mostly prisoners but also including nine hostages. This massacre took place after four days of negotiations orchestrated by the prisoners and conducted by a group of outside observers selected by the prisoners. Suffice it to say, the birthday celebration was muted, a cloud of death hanging over the dining room. I could only imagine how the families of the dead men felt. The primary official representing the state of New York was Correctional Services Commissioner Russell G. Oswald, a liberal within the prison administration. The group of observers was composed of almost two dozen men and included radical attorney William Kunstler, New York State Senator John Dunne, New York City councilman Herman Badillo, members of the Young Lords, Louis Farrakhan, and New York Times writer Tom Wicker.

Almost four years later Wicker would publish an account of the uprising titled A Time to Die. This account is a testament of the times. Wicker was an unabashed liberal when that word defined a certain political and cultural mindset that included support for civil rights, civil liberties, and the consideration that radical and revolutionary leftists not only made some valid points but that they were often right when it came to analyzing the nature of race and class in the United States. His book on Attica stands as one of the best pieces of journalism to come out of the period known as the Sixties. Fortunately, it was recently republished in a paperback edition by Haymarket Books of Chicago. Written in the third person — like much of Norman Mailer’s best journalism — Wicker describes the events that took place in Attica after he arrived there sometime during the night of September 8, 1971. His chronicle reflects the genuine concern for the lives of the prisoners and the hostages and is witness to his growing disbelief that there can ever be a peaceful resolution to the situation. That awareness is accompanied by his acknowledgement that the blame for this does not fall on the prisoners but on those in the New York government apparatus that cannot or will not see the men of Attica as human beings. The tension inside the prison and between and within the various groups involved forces Wicker to reflect on his life growing up in a union anti-segregationist family in the apartheid US South. This personal history and the contrast between the prisoners desire to be treated like humans and the bureaucrats’ determination to deny that desire causes Wicker to forsake his journalistic objectivity in favor of the inmates. In what is certainly one of his finest journalistic moments, after hearing Rockefeller tell him that granting amnesty to the prisoners would undermine the basic tenets of our society, Wicker writes:

Wicker had to stop himself from laughing–not with amusement– at this astounding irony. In a country where so many wealthy or well-represented lawbreakers could go free, where the killers at Kent State and Jackson State were not even prosecuted, where minorities (blacks and Mexican-Americans, for two good examples) suffered from openly prejudiced law in whole regions, where the poor and disadvantaged of all races usually felt the whole weight of the police, the courts, the prisons–in that country, the “equal application of the laws” was to be upheld in the case of the Attica Brothers!

If the Sixties were about freedom, and I believe that they were, then the men in Attica were ready to die for theirs. And many did. There were others in associated milieus that fought for theirs and for men like the Attica Brothers. Poet, writer, counterculture mischief-maker and rock musician Ed Sanders was one of those. His recently released biography Fug You: An Informal History of the Peace Eye Bookstore, the Fuck You Press, the Fugs, and Counterculture in the Lower East Side is a look at that battle. Sanders could be described as a member of the group of ramblers, mystics, poets, and plain old lunatics that formed a bridge between the Beatnik and hippie/freak culture. Like Neal Cassady, his age and refusal to go along with the dominant culture of the grey-flannel suit led him to places that existed on the fringes of US society, especially white US society. In the search to disengage from the mainstream culture, the men and women involved often went out of their way to offend. Given the Puritan confusion and hypocrisy about all things sexual, it was in that arena that artists and poets often played in when they wished to push the limits outward. William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg — two men who make occasional appearances in Sanders’ jerry-built memoir — knew this territory well. Indeed, by the very fact of their homosexuality, they were already outside of society (like Patti Smith sings in her tune “Rock and Roll Nigger”).

Sanders is the author of one of the best true crime books ever written in the United States. That book, titled The Family, is about Charles Manson and his group of twisted souls. Fug You is primarily about the decade before Sanders published that book. It was a decade that was full of activity for Sanders. He published one of the best known mimeographed poetry and art journals of the period. Like the photocopied zines of the 1980s and 1990s, mimeo journals were the samizdat of the art and poetry countercultures of the period. Sanders journal, known as Fuck You, published Burroughs, Ginsberg and the poets Charles Olson and Robert Creeley, among others. His magazine gained him invites to parties with the burgeoning literary and artistic elite of 1960s New York. This access in turn gave him access to patrons and a ready set of defenders whenever the obscenity police came down on his magazine, as they did somewhat frequently.

All of this, however, was but a prelude to Sanders best known (and most popular) endeavor: the creation of the rock and roll band The Fugs. I gave their first album a few listens while reading this book and am still amazed not only by the fact that they got a recording contract but that they actually broke the Billboard Top 100 a couple times. On top of that, The Fugs played on bills featuring some of the biggest bands of the period. The music The Fugs created was a mixture of straight blues, some rock and roll, a little Indian influence and just plain freakin’ noise. The lyrics were a combination of beat poetry, antiwar visions, visionary hopes, sexist nonsense and just plain babble. Like I said, it’s hard to remember that The Fugs were actually somewhat popular. That fact alone is testament itself to how much the cultural boundaries were being stretched and redefined. As for that sexism, let me clarify.

Sexism was an unfortunate part of the freedom defined by the Sixties. Not because many men were more sexist than many men are now, but because their sexism had never been challenged. The sexual repression that had ruled US popular culture to that point was being broken down. Given the generally sexist nature of the culture, that sexual freedom may have opened up minds, bodies and souls, but it did little to end the objectification of the female person. That task would fall on the feminist movement that rose from the cultural revolution of which Ed Sanders writes about in Fug You.

One could argue that, unlike the sexism of today’s media, which bases itself on the complete commodification of the body while also putting a price tag on the emotion of love, it can be argued that the sexism of the Beats and hippies was a genuine attempt to create a world of Eros referred to in Herbert Marcuse’s classic text Eros and Civilization which visualized a society “based on a fundamentally different experience of being, a fundamentally different relation between man and nature, and fundamentally different existential relations.”

There was a genuine joy in that revolution. It would soon be tempered by the repression from the State, various religious figures and institutions and the military. Sanders memoir captures all of that. He writes snippets of remembrances that together tell a good part of the story. The Living Theatre putting on their play The Brig; the authorities shutting them down. The Human Be-Ins and the attempt to bust Allen Ginsberg for marijuana. The Yippies desire to host a festival of life and the police riot that was Chicago 1968. Sanders book covers the late fifties to 1970. Wicker’s covers four days in 1971. The men in Attica, however, were there for crimes that happened during the same period that Sanders book takes place. Their denouement was a violent end to the Sixties in a much more cataclysmic way than the Altamont concert portrayed in the film Gimme Shelter, or the police murders at Kent and Jackson State. These two books represent elements of the zeitgeist of the Sixties. They also hold both possibilities and warnings for our future.

Why now? Part of the reason is because the majority of US troops are out of Iraq, thereby leaving a minimal number of American soldiers available for Iranian retaliation. A related reason could be the loss of prestige to Washington with the withdrawal of those troops. It’s not like Washington won its war in Iraq; it’s more like it was a stalemate with Tehran still holding on to a couple key cards. Israel, with an element of its ruling elites always ready to attack any perceived enemy, is of course a constant element in the drive to destroy Iran, as are the ruling families of certain Arab Gulf states that compete with Tehran in the oil market. Iran’s alleged support for various resistance movements in the Middle East and Asia provides Israel with but one more reason to call for war, especially since those resistance movements are primarily opposed to Israel’s expansionist anti-Palestinian policies.

For those warmongering pundits who haven’t yet quite jumped on the bandwagon for either an Israeli or joint US-Israeli attack comes an article in the January/February 2012 Foreign Affairs, a policy journal written by and for the US elites. The piece, written by Council of Foreign Relations member and Georgetown professor Matthew Kroenig, is titled “Time to Attack Iran.” While the title of the article leaves nothing to the imagination, Kroenig’s long-winded piece utilizes an almost Jesuitical argument as to why the United States should attack Iran now.

Briefly put, the argument goes like this. Since it is clear that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons and Israel is intent on preventing that, it would be best if the United States military launched a limited attack on Iran’s nuclear-related facilities before Israel does and starts a war with much greater consequences. After all, continues Kroenig, Washington’s forces are sophisticated enough to limit civilian casualties and take out the necessary targets. Furthermore, any retaliation would be limited, suggests Kroenig, because most of what Tehran says regarding retaliation is bluster. If some US troops die, that risk is worth it. After all, for men like Kroenig a nuclear Iran is too great of a threat to US national security, human lives be damned.

Let me briefly address this piece of idiocy. First, Kroenig does not provide any proof for his supposition that Iran is intent on developing nuclear weapons. Instead, he accepts the common presentation of IAEA reports made in the Western press, a presentation that has been shown time and time again to be a misrepresentation of the facts in those reports. Naturally, that misrepresentation suggests that Iran is ready to go live at any time with a nuclear weapon and wants to do so. Second, Kroenig easily dismisses the possibility of Iranian retaliation. From the comfort of his office at Georgetown University he makes the statement that Washington could tell Iran certain acts would be subject to massive retaliation, while others like “token missile strikes against U.S. bases and ships in the region” would be acceptable. It’s as if Mr. Kroenig was talking about a game of World of Warcraft instead of an action that might start World War Three.

It is not time to attack Iran. It is time to back away from the insanity expressed in the recent GOP debates about the need to attack Iran. It is also time to end the nonsense put forth by men and women like Mr. Kroenig. Their use of neutral and technical language to demand an attack on Iran or any other nation is more reprehensible than the demagoguery of Rick Santorum or Newt Gingrich. When I read the ramblings of technocrats like Mr. Kroenig, I can not help but be reminded of Adolf Eichmann and his office as they sent memos back and forth discussing the destruction of the European Jews. The language those men used was bureaucratic and neutral. The results were anything but.

Washington does not like the government in Tehran. The reasons for this are many, but the primary one is simple. Tehran opposes Washington’s designs for the region. It also opposes Tel Aviv’s. Washington aligns itself with Tel Aviv no matter what it does. Until Washington alters its “special relationship” with Tel Aviv so that other interests in the region are considered in a fair manner, Iran’s presence will always be a threat to Washington’s interests. As has been written many times over, Tehran has good reason not to trust the words and motivations of the United States. The last sixty years of history between the two nations is one that includes a CIA coup against a popular government; years of support to an autocratic and despotic regime whose secret police tortured and killed unknown numbers of opposition members; a secret deal between some of the most reactionary elements of the post-1979 Iranian revolutionary government and the Reagan administration that helped destroy the democratic socialist and secular elements of the revolution; and a series of attacks on Iranian ships, civilian aircraft and, most recently, its scientists.

Once again, it is not time to attack Iran. Opposing war and sanctions on that country is not equivalent to supporting the Tehran government. However, it does mean demanding that Washington to stop edging towards war on Iran, end the sanctions and do everything in its power (including suspending ALL aid and loans to Tel Aviv) to prevent Israel from launching an attack. If nuclear weapons really are the issue, then it would seem that it is time for all parties in the Mideast to begin unconditional talks establishing a nuclear free zone. It is certainly not the time to begin a war that will only convince more nations that nuclear arms are the only way they can ensure their continued existence. We must step back from the precipice.

Engels will compare his and Marx’s “bastard” progeny with the “legitimate” progeny of Herr Dühring with respect to economic production in this chapter. Dühring rejects any notion of the capitalist production system which claims that economic crises are due to the very nature of the structure of capitalism itself. That is a Marxian fantasy.

For Dühring, Engels says, “crises are only occasional deviations from ‘normalcy’ and at most only serve to promote ‘the development of a more regulated order.’” The Marxists maintain, au contraire, that crises are caused by over-production and this is a structural fault within the capitalist system itself. But Dühring rejects this and writes that the real reason for crises is, in his words, “the lagging behind of popular consumption … artificially produced under-consumption … with the natural growth of the NEEDS OF THE PEOPLE (!), which ultimately make the gulf between supply and demand so critically wide.”

To this Engels replies that the masses have been forced to under-consume throughout history and in every economic system based on class exploitation, therefore under-consumption is not some artificially produced phenomenon but something all class societies share — i.e., that the exploited class never has the value of its yearly production returned to it at the end of the year. The crises of industrial capitalism, however, only date from the the first quarter of the nineteenth century.

Thus, Engels concludes, it is under capitalism that periodic economic crises come into the world and while under-consumption of the masses is a PREREQUISITE it is not the CAUSE of crises. And knowing this, he says, “tells us just as little why crises exist today as why they did not exist before.”

Dühring, in fact, does not think mass markets are all that important anyway. He himself says that capitalist production happens to “depend for its market mainly on THE CIRCLES OF THE POSSESSING CLASSES THEMSELVES.” His confusion becomes only more apparent when he follows up on this by claiming that the most important industries (this is the 1870s remember) are cotton and iron production. But, Engels points out, the production of these two is entirely dependent on a mass market and the possessing class make up only an “infinitesimally small degree” of its market.

Engels then points out that capitalism, by it very need to grow and expand, brings about crises. He says, for example, in England there is just one small town (Oldham) that from 1872 to 1875 doubled its production of spun cotton [the number of its spindles went from 2.5 to 5 million] and this is just one of a dozen small towns around Manchester. Oldham, by the way, produced as much spun cotton as ALL of Germany (including Alsace). This was happening in towns all over Great Britain.

It thus shows “deep-rooted effrontery” on the part of Herr Dühring to blame the English masses for under-consumption rather than the capitalists for over-production when it comes to “the present complete stagnation in the yarn and cloth markets.”²

Engels ends his critique of Herr Dühring’s views on crises but gives a few quotes that demonstrate that Dühring has no idea about capitalism as an economic system but sees everything in terms of the behavior of individuals. If over-speculation and the unplanned building of private factories are responsible for crises we must see that as simply “the ordinary interplay of overstrain and relaxation” of the system and look closely at “the rashness of individual entrepreneurs and the lack of private circumspection” as one of the causes.

The only “rashness” here, Engels maintains, is the habit of turning the facts of economics into “moral reprobation.” This is a problem of our times as well, not just the time of Engels. How often do we hear talk about our current crisis as a product of “greed” on the part of Wall Street bankers and that they should pay their “fair share” of taxes and such rubbish as if the decay of capitalism is a moral disorder on the part of the ruling class instead of a structural disorder that requires the replacement of the system rather than remedial Sunday school classes for the capitalists.

But all this has been treated of in the previous chapter of Anti-Dühring and Engels wants to move on (Cf. “Frederick Engels on the Theoretical Development of Modern Capitalism” in the November 2011 Political Affairs). Engels will now turn his attention to Dühring’s new system of viewing socialism which is called “the natural system of society.”

Dühring bases his system of socialism on what he calls the “universal principle of justice” which applies everywhere and is independent of historical and economic facts. This is enough to disqualify it as idealistic nonsense but Engels wants to philosophically pepper spay Dühring for having the gall to attack Marx for being unclear and fuzzy as to what type of socialism he believes in. It appears that the demands made in the name of the workers in the Communist Manifesto are “erroneous half measures” far inferior to Dühring’s ideas which represent “a comprehensive schematism of great import in human history.”

Marx, according to Dühring, thinks of socialism as “nothing more than the corporative ownership by groups of workers … an ownership that is both individual and social.” Engels is upset because this is far from anything Marx has suggested and in truth actually applies to the system that Dühring has concocted.

Dühring advocates a federation of independent economic communes which compete with one another and which have absolute freedom of movement from one commune to another. In this crazy system the wealthy successful communes will out compete the poorly run communes which will become defunct as the people will all end up moving to the well run ones.

Production within the communes stays the same as production in the past — i.e., the communes are still capitalist in nature even though controlled by the workers. So the greatly touted natural system of justice and the new socialism amounts to the fact, Engels says, that “the commune takes the place of the capitalists.”

What are Dühring’s views on the most basic form of all hitherto existing methods of production — i.e., the division of labor? With respect to the primary division, that between TOWN and COUNTRY (or industry and agriculture) he has little to say beyond some common place remarks about its “inevitable” nature and the possibility of overcoming it in the future. Thin gruel from Engels’ point of view.

When it comes to the modern division of labor in trade and industry Dühring is very vague and only says that we have an “erroneous division of labor” and that all will be remedied in the future “as soon as account is taken of the various natural conditions and personal capabilities [of the workers].” Engels doesn’t say so, but Dühring’s views here are suspiciously similar to those of Plato in the Republic and very far from the socialist analysis of Marx to which Engels now turns.

Marx tells us that in all societies where production springs up “spontaneously” (including capitalism) we discover the means of production dominate the people not the other way around. The first great division of labour saw the development of towns and cities surrounded by peasant agriculturalists. This division has doomed rural people for thousands of years, Marx says, to “mental torpidity” and enslaved the town dwellers to their own specialized trade. This “stunting” of humanity increases with the increase of the division of labor.

Under capitalism the workers become tied to their machines and to one specific function and one tool. Capitalism, Marx says in Das Kapital “converts the laborer into a crippled monstrosity. by forcing his detail dexterity at the expense of a world of productive capabilities and instincts…. The individual himself is made the automatic motor of a fractional operation.” How much this has been alleviated by the modern day union movement varies from country to country and in proportion to the percentage of workers who are unionized. The large number of working people in the US for example, that vote Republican shows that “mental torpidity” is not confined to the rural populations of Texas, Iowa or Alaska (to name a few).

It is not just the workers who suffer under the present day division of labor but also, Engels says, the “empty-minded bourgeois” chasing after profits (Donald Trump comes to mind), the lawyers dominated by “fossilized legal conceptions” and so-called “educated classes” of society plagued by “local narrow-mindedness” and “mental short-sightedness”– just think of the tribe of Sunday morning news pundits paraded before the public by all the major TV networks, or the platoons of professors giving advice about everything under the sun and hardly agreeing on anything other than that capitalism is still the best of all possible economic formations.

But how are we to overcome this division of labor and the consequent alienation of humanity from its potentials and possibilities? One way only says Engels: “in making itself the master of all the means of production to use them in accordance with a social plan, society puts an end to the former subjection of men to their own means of production.” In other words, socialism based on central planning and most importantly — a feature historically absent in 20th century socialist societies due to their premature appearance in economically backward conditions — planning democratically controlled and carried out by the working people themselves. The former alienating division of labor will be done away with as “society cannot free itself unless every individual is freed.”

Engels says that this is not just a “fantasy” or a “pious wish.” He maintains that the state of industrial development in the 1870s is so advanced that society could “reduce the time required for labour to a point which measured by our present conceptions, will be small indeed.” This figure needs to be actually quantified — but the point is all the goodies needed to live and thrive could be created with people just working a few hours a week and with no one being chained to any one boring and unsatisfying job. The growth in productivity since Engels’ day must make this even more true today.

Engels quotes Das Kapital: “The employment of machinery does away with the necessity of crystallizing this distribution [of labor-tr] after the manner of Manufacture, by the constant annexation of a particular man to a particular function. Since the motion of the whole system does not proceed from the workman, but from the machinery, a change of persons can take place at any time without an interruption of the work….”

Modern capitalism with its constant crises and dislocations of industrial centers and working people and financial catastrophes makes, Marx says, it necessary that we posit as a “fundamental law of production, variation of work” so that modern workers have to be ready to change jobs and learn new skills or leave the labor market. This disrupts lives and threatens widespread social disorder. Only socialist planning and a system that puts people before profits can prevent society from self destructing under the contradictions generated by the present capitalist world market which, in the name of profits first and people last, fragments both human individuals and their social relations with others which inevitably results from the private appropriation of socially created wealth.

Engels also says that the abolition of capitalism and the development “one single vast plan” which harmoniously “dovetails” industry and the means of production so that the differences between town and country are overcome is a prerequisite to overcoming environmental degradation and “present poisoning the air water and land.” To this must be added the current disaster of human induced global warming which simply cannot be dealt with as long as capitalism remains the dominant economic system. This problem was not seen in Engels’ day and now, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence of impending doom, the various capitalist powers are unwilling to take the drastic regulatory measures needed to deal with the problem.

Engels maintains that none of these claims he is making is “utopian” but that they are logical conclusions of scientific central planning and the abolition of the difference between town and country. It looks as if the towns, or rather the great cities (such as New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Beijing, etc., etc., will have be abolished as well! Engels says that it “is true that in the huge towns civilization has bequeathed us a heritage which it will take much time and trouble to get rid of.” But, “the great towns will perish.”

No, this is not Pol Pot, it is Frederick Engels and he is saying this because he envisions a complete redistribution of the population under socialism in order to get the “most equal distribution possible of modern industry.” So the abolition of the separation of town and country means the abolition of the cities. They must and will be eliminated “however protracted a process it may be.” This might just be a little too “utopian” and perhaps with the progress of science and communications since the 1870s, especially the growth of the internet, the contradictions between town and country can be resolved without offing the Big Apple.

In any event, leaving the abolition of cities aside, the point Engels wants to make is that Dühring’s view of socialism leaves out of account that building socialism will necessitate “revolutionizing from top to bottom the old method of production and first of all putting an end to the old division of labour.” Dühring thinks that the state can just take over production as is and harmonize it to people’s “natural appetites and personal capabilities.” He also thinks the division between town and country is natural and inevitable and has no plan for putting an end to the alienation and crippling of human capabilities that result from this division.

So much for Engels’ critique of Dühringian socialism’s handling of production. In the penultimate chapter of Anti-Dühring Engels will discuss the problems of distribution.

1. Anti-Dühring Part III Chapter III “Production.”
2. Engels is referring to an economic crises of the 1870s.

This month PM Press, the Oakland, CA. publisher founded by AK Press founder Ramsey Kanaan and others, is publishing Gilbert’s memoirs. The book, titled Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond, is certain to be included in the top tier of books having to do with the period of US history known as the Sixties. There is no self-pity within these pages, but lots of self-reflection. In what can only be considered a refreshing approach, Gilbert takes full responsibility for the path he has chosen and explains that path in an intelligently political manner and with a decidedly leftist understanding. Love and Struggle combines objective history, personal memory, and a critical perspective into a narrative that is at once an adventuresome tale and a political guide through the past fifty years.

Gilbert begins his story by describing his youth and his developing awareness that the United States was not what he had been led to believe it was. An Eagle Scout who believed the myths inherent in American exceptionalism, he was unprepared for the cognitive dissonance he underwent while watching the attacks by law enforcement on civil rights marchers in the US South. That sense of conflict deepened when he headed off to Columbia University. By 1965, angered by the US war on the Vietnamese and armed with a well-researched understanding of why the US was really involved there, Gilbert was organizing Columbia students to join antiwar protests. Like many of his contemporaries, by 1968 he was an anti-imperialist and working full-time against the war in Vietnam and racism in the United States. By 1969, he was one of the original members of Weatherman and by April 1970 he was underground.

Gilbert tells his story with a hard-learned humility. Occasionally interjecting his personal life–his loves and failures, his relationship with his family–with his political journey, it is the politics which are foremost in this memoir. A true revolutionary, every other aspect of Gilbert’s life is subsumed to the revolution. This kind of life is not an easy one. Indeed, it arguably makes the life of an ascetic monk look easy by comparison. After all, the monk is only trying to change himself, while the committed revolutionary wants to change the world into one where justice prevails; a world that by its very structure resists such change.

Love and Struggle carefully examines the history of the periods Gilbert has lived in. From the early days of the antiwar movement and the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) to the public street-fighting arrogance of early Weatherman; from Weatherman’s transition to the Weather Underground Organization (WUO) and its growing isolation from the New Left it was a part of; and from the post-Vietnam war US left to the Brink robbery and its aftermath, Gilbert keeps the politics front and center in his text. In his discussion of the period between Weather’s publication of its essential work Prairie Fire and its immediate aftermath, Gilbert provides an insight into the debates inside WUO and among its supporters in the years after the peace treaty was signed with northern Vietnam. His portrayal of the differences around theory being debated in the WUO serve as a broader description of the debates raging throughout the new left as the US intervention in Vietnam’s anti-colonial struggle neared its end. For those of us who were politically involved at the time, the debates ring with familiarity: national liberation over class; the interaction between race and class in the US; the oppression of women and white male privilege. In a testimony to his writing abilities, Gilbert’s discussion of the issues makes them as alive in this book as those arguments actually were in the mid-1970s. His keen political sense reveals the interplay between different political perspectives, understandings of history, and the always present contests of ego. The political arguments outlined by Gilbert (especially when describing the battle inside WUO) are still relevant today. Their echoes are present in the General Assemblies of the Occupy Wall Street movement and in forums more specific and less specific across the nation. Gilbert’s presentation of the essential WUO arguments that challenges the overriding role of class in the nature of oppression is not only reasoned and impassioned, it is worth studying and makes points useful to the future of anti-imperialist struggle in the United States Furthermore, the book includes an ongoing and excellent discussion of the nature of white supremacy and white skin privilege. For anyone who has spent time involved in the Occupy movement the past few months, the relevance of this latter discussion is all too familiar.

For those looking for a sensationalist account of life as a revolutionary or a confession, they should look elsewhere. David Gilbert’s memoir is a political account of a political life. Every action undertaken, every decision made is examined via the eye of a leftist revolutionary. This does not mean there are no page-turning moments in the book, however. Indeed, the sections describing Weather’s move underground and Gilbert’s daily life off the grid are interesting and revealing, as are those describing the attempts by WUO members to evade capture. The descriptions of Gilbert’s clandestine life and his subsequent moving back aboveground and then back under are also riveting.

Underlying the entire narrative is a current of what is best described as self-criticism; of Weather, the New Left, armed struggle and, ultimately, of Gilbert himself. As anyone who has experienced something akin to a self-criticism session can attest, such sessions can be emotionally wrenching episodes of retribution and petty anger. They can also be tremendously useful when conducted humanely. Gilbert’s written attempts at this exercise in Love and Struggle lean toward the latter expression while also providing interesting and useful considerations to the aforementioned issues (along with issues related to those criticisms). Gilbert’s realization that his ego occasionally caused him to make decisions that weren’t based on politically sound rationales is something any radical leader should take into account. In fact, Gilbert’s continuing struggle with his ego and it’s place in the decisions he made while free reminded me of a maxim relayed to me a couple times in my life; once by an organizer for the Revolutionary Union in Maryland and once by a friend from the Hog Farm commune. That maxim is simply: if you start believing that the revolution can’t exist without you, then it’s time to leave center stage and go back to doing grunt work where nobody knows (or cares) who you are. In other words, you are not the revolution so take your ego out of it.

In the well-considered catalog of books dealing honestly with the period of history known as the Sixties in the United States, Love and Struggle is an important addition. Borrowing his technique from memoir, confession, and objective history-telling, David Gilbert has provided the reader of history with the tale of a person and a time. Simultaneously, he has given the reader inclined to political activism a useful, interesting, and well-told example of one human’s revolutionary commitment to social change no matter what the cost.

Both leaders said what would be expected of them under these circumstances. Haniyeh asserted that his movement’s “presence with the Brotherhood threatens the Israeli entity,” and Badie reaffirmed the Brotherhood’s commitment to “issues of liberation, foremost the Palestinian issue” (MENA and AP, December 26).

It is very telling that Haniyeh’s first official visit outside Gaza as prime minister was to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood headquarters in Cairo’s Moqattam district. He shared his message – of resistance against Israeli occupation, national unity with rival Fatah and reaching out to Muslim countries – and then resumed his regional tour.

Since 2006, Hamas has attempted, but largely failed to win the approval of governments in Muslim-majority countries. Muslim solidarity was the thrust of Hamas’ foreign policy, aimed at lessening Palestinian political and financial dependence on the US and other Western governments. It failed because, as it turned out, US financial and political leverage is too overpowering and far-reaching for a relatively small movement like Hamas to singlehandedly challenge. But, as Haniyeh himself reiterated, times are changing

In the first and second rounds of Egyptian elections, the Brotherhood’s newly created Freedom and Justice party won more than 35 percent of the vote. The electoral success was hardly an anomaly. The Islamic Nahda party, which formed the first post-revolutionary government in Tunisia, won more than 40 percent of the vote last October. Morocco’s Justice and Development party won the November elections and the Islamic leaning of Libya’s new political set up is all too palpable. There have been marks of Islamic political influence in other countries across the region.

The reformation of the political landscape in the Arab region has tempted many to infer polarizing, if not frightening conclusions. Israeli army Home Front Command Chief Major General Eyal Eisenberg was one of the first in Israel to refer to these developments as an Arab Spring turning into a “radical Islamic winter”. He said, “This leads us to the conclusion that through a long-term process, the likelihood of an all-out war is increasingly growing” (Arutz Sheva, September 5).

However, what truly worries Israel is not the radicalization of Muslim societies, but the rise of Islamic politics to represent a rational, mainstream political discourse. It threatens Israel because it could rally many Arabs around one cohesive political agenda, and repositions Palestine, once more, as central to what many Muslim intellectuals refer to as the “Islamic Awakening”.

Israeli fear mongering aside, the US – Israel’s main benefactor – must find ways to co-exist with the new political arrangement. Other Western governments too “will have to adapt to a power shift they have long sought to prevent,” wrote Roula Khalaf and Heba Saleh in the Financial Times (December 28).

For Israel, however, the transformation in regional politics will prove unbearable. It is not Tunisia’s Nahda party that Israel is most concerned about, of course; it is Hamas. This is partly what compelled Haniyeh to venture out of Gaza. As the US is hoping to control, if not manage, the rise of Islamic parties, Hamas aims at ensuring a primary position for Palestine – as seen through the prism of the Islamic movement – in the region’s new political landscape.

There is little doubt that Hamas’ rise to political prominence in 2006, and the numerous subsequent attempts at isolating and destroying it will influence new Islamic parties in various Arab countries. Hamas’ ability to survive has certainly registered among new Muslim politicians in Egypt and elsewhere. Now, with the early fruits of the Egyptian revolution being plucked by Islamic parties, Hamas is guardedly making its move. Hamas is a “jihadi movement of the Brotherhood with a Palestinian face,” said Haniyeh in Cairo.

A quick look at the roots of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine shows that Haniyeh was hardly exaggerating. Since the Society of the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Ismailiyya, Egypt in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna and a few others, it quickly found in Palestine a rally cry to unite Muslims through the entire region. The first link between the movement and Palestine was formed in 1935, when Abd al-Rahman al-Banna (the founder’s brother) visited Palestine and met with the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini.

The Brotherhood became visible during the revolt of 1936, as they communicated the Palestinian message with an Islamic tone to the rest of the Arab world. The cause of Palestine promptly became the central mission and calling of the Brotherhood, as Hasan al-Banna himself headed the newly founded General Central Committee to Aid Palestine.

More, in April 1948, when most Arab governments delayed in partaking in the defense of Palestine, the Muslim Brotherhood deployed three battalions of volunteers. Estimates of the number of Brotherhood volunteers in Palestine during the war and the subsequent Nakba vary, but Hasan al-Banna himself noted, in March 1948, that the movement had approximately 1,500 volunteers in Palestine.

The relationship between the Brotherhood and Palestine had it ebbs and flows, but the rapport was never completely severed. Even before Hamas was officially established in 1987, the movement functioned under various classifications, all directly affiliated with Egypt’s Brotherhood.

The recent Cairo meeting between Haniyeh and Badie could be understood within that historical context, representing a triumphant reunion and possibly open coordination. This would once again rejuvenate the Brotherhood’s Palestine connection, and grant Hamas greater political leverage – after years of isolation, and despite the current political turmoil in the region.

Of course, Hamas’ challenges are many and growing. Leading among them is Israel’s violent escalation in Gaza, and the unremitting US pressure. Still, it is expected that Hamas’ political message and outlook will continue to find balance between Palestinian exceptionality and the more inclusive Arab and Islamic framework.

By venturing out of Gaza, Haniyeh is hoping to expand the diameters of the Palestinian Islamic movement into Egypt and beyond – thus reclaiming what Hamas once considered ‘the strategic depth’ of the Palestinian cause. While such a push failed to attain its objectives in 2006, 2012 is a brand new year.

One Law for Lion and Ox is Oppression.

— William Blake

Where is the place of understanding?  Where is wisdom to be found?

— The  Book of Job

Info coming at us at the speed of light—gigabytes per nano-sec—and our horse-and-buggy bio-chem brains struggle with ancient grammars, syntaxes and texts!  Even our metaphors are now wretchedly overwrought: Not, “how to connect the dots,” but how to perceive, measure, record and duck the shot-gunned info-pellets rushing at our faces!  No wonder the world has gone gaga—not Lady!—for predictions!  “The world is too much with us,” so maybe those Mayan calendrical types knew a thing or two.  Maybe Nostradamus.  Maybe Cayce.  Somebody must know something!

Last decade, in September, ‘07, I posted a piece called “Can the Left and Right Unite?”  That was long before President “Hopey-Changey” had risen on his rhetorical pinions just long enough to foist on the gullible–one of the best bait-and-switch” acts in U.S. political history.  It was a year before the Lehman Brothers “Great Recession” began; before TARP; before Europe’s implosion; before Tahrir Square; before the B.P. and Fukushima disasters; before the Tea Party and Occupy Movements; before Bin Laden’s and Saddam’s and Kim’s and Gaddafi’s demise, and Representative Giffords’ near-demise; before the Supreme Court sanctified corporate, financial, electoral control; before the National Defense Authorization Act, etc.!

Four years ago, the chief divisions in the country had to do with prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and most Americans were united in thinking “terrorists” the enemy, but not sure how to get them.  Nobody had declared the American homeland a “battlefield” in the War on Terror—with all the ominous implications of such a designation.

Now, the war in Afghanistan slogs on, and the shadow of our wars in Mesopotamia will haunt us through the ages.  The possibility of war with Iran is a warmonger’s wet-dream now—and the sheets are gross and soggy.  Now, perhaps, it can begin to be said and heard: It was Bushwhackian, Rumsfeldian, Cheney-Reese and Powellesque, Pearle and Wolfowitz idiocy to attack Iraq; and our heedless diversion and waste of resources has helped to bankrupt us financially and morally.  We’ve continued to hammer, frack and bomb our egg of a planet and now we’re dancing on a thin eggshell—and we’re mostly tap-dancing alone, not waltzing with a willing partner.

Not impressed by Obama’s card-shark, Mac-the-Knife routine, I sat out the last presidential election and urged others to purposively—not apathetically–do so, too.  But that was then.

As of now, there is only one candicate for whom I’d seriously consider voting.

The main reasons are: (1) He’s the only one who talks about our over-extended “Empire.”  He actually uses that word!  (2) He’s the most anti-war.  He talks about employing diplomacy a lot more and military force a lot less.  Give brains a chance!  (3) He is the only candidate who wants to abolish the Fed—and offers sound reasons for doing so.  (4) He presents well-reasoned arguments, not “9-9-9” style gibberish.  (5) He has argued his beliefts carefully and consistently for decades.  (6) His personal life has been a model of good citizenship and family values.

I’m talking about Ron Paul, of course, and I can hear the clamor of my “progressive” (formerly, “liberal”) friends wondering if I, too, have lost my prayer beads.  So, here’s my take: If we lived in a truly “free” society, where the masses had access to the skinny about how the System works, the high and growing levels of corruption and decadence in every branch of our government—federal, state, local—and if we had an educated working class, making the best-informed tactical and strategic moves to advance common values, able to work their way through the morass of media-corporate-government hype and propaganda… I’d say, Hold off, final victory will be ours!

But nothing today smells remotely like that!  This is not Sweden, Iceland, Switzerland, nor is it Never-Neverland where people don’t grow old and sick and tired and die.  We are a globe-straddling Empire, imposing our lifestyle and disposing of our opponents with engineered coups and revolutions, and our modus operandi is more akin to Tony Soprano’s than to the amorphous “good guys” we esteem ourselves. Surveiling and managing the planet, in ways that are often nasty and devious, we are well along the usual trajectory of past “super-powers”: expansion, over-expansion, attacks abroad and crumbling infrastructure within, and, finally, kaput, nada, nada y nada! 

We’ve always been an Empire—check out latter correspondence between Jefferson and Adams. … Our nastiest business, our Civil War, had a lot more to do with managing the newly acquired Western territories—agrarian or industrial motif?—than with freeing slaves.  (Do we really think recently arrived Irish immigrants wanted nothing more than to get drafted into “Mr. Lincoln’s War”?  Check out the New York City draft riots for a quick refresher!)

We like to tell ourselves we’re the kind of people who only go to war for noble reasons, but the fact is… we’ve been the most successful conquerors in human history and we’ve stirred up hornet’s nests everywhere.  We have been the “Now” people, barely looking back, whose forward motion has been propelled by carrots dangled by illusionists.

When the present moment is as slippery as this one, people are apt to take solace in nostalgia for simpler times or in  fantasizing a better tomorrow.  (When miscreants like Newt Gingrich are taken seriously as “historians,” you know we’ve got serious problems about learning from our past!)  About “tomorrow”–we’re a species condemned to hope.  Hope and Imagination are always “leaps of faith,” but they work better when they are informed.

Eighteenth-century “Romantic” poet Blake was on the cusp of England’s Industrial Revolution—and he didn’t like the smell of things!  A visionary from childhood, seeing angels in trees, he thought anyone could be a prophet… so long as they carefully examined life whirling around them and life within.  “Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d,” he wrote.  Two hundred years later, our crystal balls are murky and all our messengers are suspect.

As we spin out of whirligig 2011 into the free-fall gravity of 2012, about information-overload, we may cry out with Job, “Where is the place of understanding?  Where is wisdom to be found?”

The U.S. has done some terrible things in this world and some would say we’ve been in a kind of karmic blow-back since 2001.  We collectively grieve, rightly so, at the horror of a woman losing her parents and three children in a Christmas-day blaze in Connecticut.  How senseless, tragic and bizarre!  Can a loving God permit such horrors on Christmas day?  To understand the kind of tragedy that has befallen Iraqis since our invasion and continuing occupation, one would have to multiply the Stamford horror about 1 million times over the past eight years!

Not because he has done evil, but simply to test and prove his faith and goodness, Job’s children and grandchildren are killed, his cattle killed, and he is cursed with boils.  And his wife asks, “Dost thou still retain thy integrity?  Curse God and die.”  She is empathetic; she sees her husband’s searing wounds and advises him to choose the oblivion of death instead.  Job tells her to stop talking foolishness; he will suffer much more, if need be.  And…, he does.  And before it all ends with a show of force and a little more info—straight from the Whirlwind’s mouth!—about how things really work, Job tells his three comforters (really, intellectual tormentors), “Till I die, I will not remove my integrity from me.”

“Integrity” is the key word in this extraordinary, pre-Grecian drama.  And if we are going to get through our next pivotal year intact — and, very likely, re-constituted — it is essential that we understand that concept the way it was meant back then.  It is similar to our word “integer” or single unit, and its meaning has a Taoistic, Asian flavoring rather than our looser, modern sense of “general honesty” or “decency”—difficult and noble as those virtues are.  Rather, the sense here is of “wholeness.”  Job can no sooner remove his identity than he can remove his skin.  His integrity is all-of-a-piece with whom he is—his identity, his being.

Now for Blake: the ox has his “integrity” being an ox, and the lion his just being him.  Both are powerful with legit claims on the world to sustain them as they are and wish to be.  You wouldn’t want to pull a wagon with two lions and you wouldn’t want to take down a wildebeast with a couple of oxen.  Each has its place, each does its thing; and if the lion can lie down with the lamb, he can also lie down with the ox.

Everywhere one looks in the world today one sees tension and divisions, strife, a lack of clarity, and a constant resort to the dialogue of guns, knives and bombs.  Did we fight the Cold War only to inherit a world gone mad, dividing along ancient fault-lines—Sunni/Shiite, Jewish/Muslim, Christian/Muslim–and along new ones of class?  Half of all Americans are at 200% or less of the poverty level for a family of four.  To put it another way, fifty percent of us are not “getting by” or just barely getting by, and most of those who are “better off” are scared as hell.  And people who are scared are easily manipulated—especially when doused with fear of foreign threats.  (Just ask Goebbels!)

Amidst the maya of illusions and delusions, we stumble along in our made-up world.  We can only see through a glass darkly, and the glass is a fifty-inch wide-screen HDTV with surround sound—and 3-D is coming!  Amidst the maya, we lose precision in our language, our discourse, our thinking, our literature, our relations with each other, with the powerful and with the downtrodden.  Professor Gingrich, commenting on Herman Caine’s alleged sexual abuses, remarks that he is “sorry for he and his famly.”  That’s it!  I’m outta hea’!   Here’s a guy who brags about being an “historian” and the two dozen books he’s written, and he doesn’t know the objective case of pronouns?

I don’t put much stock in American elections anymore.  (Maybe we need “international observers”… but who do we trust?)  The best one can hope for is what Ed Sullivan would call, “a really good shew.”  We put far too much faith in the figurehead of our president when our history since Kennedy should have shown us that even a top banana can be easily peeled—exploded in the public square, and then re-packaged as an aberrance, anomoly, a myth.  So now we’re stuck with this: Even an election victory that championed populist values of both the Left and the Right would be hemmed in by thousands of special interests and lobbysists, not to mention billions of contrapuntal bucks!

That’s what we’re up against… and any New Populist campaign must recognize those electronic realities.  Nevertheless, such a campaign would mean a voice raised and heeded.  It would mean a resurgence of resistance to the Neoliberal agenda of war and exploitation that both Left and Right can now oppose.

The best reason for the lion and the ox to collaborate is, ironically, to maintain their integrity!  Because the Corporate State is rapidly robbing all of us of cherished core values like “live and let live,” a “helping hand,” “all in the same boat” and the “individualism” essential to thinking and acting without duress.  The media mish-mash of sounds and images adds to the kaleidoscopic confusion, and no one seems to have remembered to unwind a string as we approach the Minotaur’s lair.

The real enemy of Occupiers and Tea-partiers is not the other guy, but the faraway robotic types guiding the predator drones above our global rafters.  How do you make sense of it all when you’re beaten down and scared of losing your home, your job, your health, your family?

For years I was for a woman’s right to choose… and I still am.  But, when I heard Paul speak of his experience as a young doctor, going into one hospital room where an aborted fetus had been unceremoniously discarded and walking down the hall into another where every effort was being made to save a mother and her life-endangered baby… I saw his opposition from another point of view, and felt the sincerity of that point of view.  Now, to counter-argue, one might say that to prevent the need for abortions better sex education should be available.  And that adoptions should be encouraged, etc.

Better sex education… and better every kind of education!  Had we not fallen so notoriously behind in our test scores, we might not be in the mess we’re in now.  Had we paid attention to the infrastructure of education, bridges, public utilities, transportation and communication, the Arts, we’d be able to get through this next hell of a year standing together, with a lot more equanimity.

“Opposition is true Friendship,” Blake wrote.

The “separation of Church and State” that Americans cherish was never meant to be a separation of morals and the State.  Yet, it is our moral core, our “integrity,” that has been lost amidst the funhouse mirrors of commercialism, consumerism, militarism, ethnocentrism, more and more and more.

In this winter of our discontent, the war clouds gather and austerity miseries grind the souls of those who have no homes, or broken homes.  We’re in a poisoned mine shaft and the canaries are singing. … Can we interpret their varied notes in time?